The establishment of accurate and timely knowledge about the various network devices, applications, and services is an essential part of running a modern IT organization. Without this up-to-date understanding of your network's assets, enterprises face many challenges, including risk mitigation, compliance failures, and lack of capacity for planning.
As networks become more complex and dynamic, traditional approaches to network asset inventory have reached their limits. Simultaneously, open source software has grown in significance about enterprise infrastructure. What began as an experimental effort supported by communities has matured into an evolving set of enterprise-grade tools being used by some of the world's largest organizations.
What is the future of open-source network inventory?
The landscape of open-source network inventory solutions is changing rapidly and will continue to do so over the next few years. The introduction of new patterns in architecture, more automation, and stronger security integrations are shaping the future of these solutions.
In this article, the authors will discuss how these trends will shape open source network inventory in the future and what enterprise leaders should expect to see.
How are the networks of five years ago different from today's networks?
Networks from five years ago look different from the networks of today because hybrid cloud services have created interconnected redundant systems that allow businesses to increase their on-site resources while also improving their data access.
In addition, there has been an exponential growth in remote work due to COVID-19, resulting in increased asset and connection counts.
Due to this exponential growth, traditional manual discovery processes and static spreadsheets that do not track real-time data cannot keep pace as per Slurp'it.
Inventory data is virtually useless due to the speed at which it becomes outdated and then, due to several factors, leads to distrust and increased risk.
Therefore, as reported by Gartner, a lack of proper visibility of your assets continues to be one of the leading causes of security incidents and compliance violations among large enterprises.
How did it evolve from static records to continuous inventory management?
One of the most important trends in upcoming open source network tools will be moving from static, outdated systems to a system that is continuously updated and reflects the current status of your network.
Future open-source inventory tools are set to provide automatic updates as items change within your network and use multiple sources to pull data from, including network devices, cloud APIs, Configuration Management Systems (CMS), and Orchestration Platforms.
This continuous discovery model allows users to ensure their inventory documentation is as up-to-date as their actual environment, reducing the visibility gap between items in their documentation and the true state of their network as per Slurp'it.
This will allow users to have greater confidence that they can use their inventory data as a basis for making operational and security decisions.
How is it integrated with automation?
Another significant trend is the growing integration of it with automation pipelines. Many of today's automation workflows use application programming interfaces (APIs) and event streams exposed by open source tools to be able to use inventory data to inform automation decision-making.
An example of this is an automation workflow using inventory data to check whether a specific networking device is compliant with security requirements prior to making a configuration change.
According to research from Red Hat, the inclusion of automation plus infrastructure visibility leads to organizations having faster deployment cycles as well as fewer configuration errors.
Open source will play an important role in automating and validating the processes of change recovery and orchestration.
What is the availability of open source network inventory hybrid and multi-cloud solutions?
In the current age, few enterprises only have a single cloud platform. Networks consist of on-premises data centers located worldwide along with multiple cloud platforms and edge devices.
As a result, open-source solutions have begun to develop ways to enable organizations to manage these complex network environments with more effective hybrid/multi-cloud solutions.
New cloud-native open-source projects have been designed to utilize modular collection systems and plug-ins to gather and provide information from multiple data sources (e.g., public clouds, private clouds, or thousands of locations within an organization).
There are substantial benefits to having access to open-source inventory solutions; one of the largest benefits is the ability to maintain an overall unified view of the organization's entire infrastructure without having to fit all of the organization's environments into a defined model as per Slurp'it.
Why is there increased focus on compliance-driven use cases?
There is a significant shift in the number of organizations utilizing these solutions for compliance and security purposes, making them among the most influential use cases of network inventory systems.
Soon, many open-source inventory solutions will likely encapsulate security context directly into the inventory system and will include the following types of information: Exposure,
- Segmentation,
- Encryption methodologies
- Transportation/access control methods.
To accelerate the discovery of "risky" network devices, organizations can leverage both inventory data and security-related metadata (e.g. asset classification) to identify these devices quickly.
As an illustration, an organization can identify quickly which devices on their networks lack proper security controls or do not meet their segmentation model requirements.
How might network inventory in the future be influenced by open source?
They have many of the right business-case features for the enterprise.
- They are designed to provide insight into how data is collected and how it is processed, allowing for customization while still avoiding vendor lock-in.
- They also allow businesses to capitalize on the rapid pace of innovation driven by the many contributors to open-source projects as per Slurp'it.
The current state of network inventory has changed dramatically from a simple documentation exercise to a dynamic capability that underpins security, compliance, automation, and planning.
Open-source network inventory solutions are changing rapidly to meet the needs of modern networks. The following trends are expected to drive the future development of these solutions:
- Continuous discovery
- Automating integrated processes,
- Hybrid support for multi-cloud environments,
- Leveraging advanced analytics.
To conclude, the number of networks will continue to increase both in size and complexity, further solidifying the role of open-source network inventory solutions as a key component of successful IT operations. For more information, contact us at Slurp'it!