AlgoSec Debuts Business Application Mapping Platform

Security policy management specialist AlgoSec debuted its AutoDiscovery platform, which automatically discovers all business applications, traffic flows and interdependencies across enterprise networks using IP probes or existing packet-sniffing tools.

The platform generates an up-to-date connectivity map for all business applications, without needing any prior knowledge or manual configuration by security, network or application experts.

“Any organization will benefit from being able to automatically and accurately map their business applications and connectivity flows, especially those that are preparing to migrate applications to the cloud or to a micro-segmented software-defined network environment,” Joanne Godfrey, AlgoSec’s director of communications and strategy, told eWEEK. “In order to ensure a smooth, secure and successful migration, you need to be able to first identify and map your applications and all interdependencies.”

Only after businesses have this information can they effectively migrate and adjust existing connectivity flows for the new virtual environment, she said. Mapping is critical when business applications are moved or migrated in data centers or to private or public cloud infrastructures.

“Companies typically struggle to identify their applications and their dependent network traffic flows across today’s complex enterprise environments, because they have little to no up-to-date documentation on application connectivity and it can take months to gather this information,” she said. “Even the most minor of mistakes in reconfiguring network traffic flows during a migration can cause an outage or a security hole.”

Twenty percent of firms had a security breach and nearly half (48 percent) had an application outage caused by manual processing errors, according to AlgoSec’s 2016 survey on the state of automation in security.

“A new solution has to be as simple and easy as possible for the end user to use,” Godfrey said. “AutoDiscovery automates the whole process of identifying and mapping application connectivity and gathers this information into a highly visualized, intuitive map that’s seamlessly integrated with the AlgoSec security policy management platform.”

The platform automatically tags business applications to create security policies for next-generation firewalls and software-defined data centers (SDDCs).

In addition, the platform can automatically identify and display discovered business applications, including their names and URLs, for easy viewing and analysis, as well as identify and map all the connectivity flows for each business application and any interdependencies with other applications.

Godfrey noted that being able to identify and map applications and their connectivity flows is an essential process to effectively and securely migrate applications to support new business transformation initiatives such as cloud and software-defined networking (SDN), and is the cornerstone of an application-centric approach that drives business agility, calling it the future of security management.