Key Principles to Web-Scaling a Network
At the Black Hat 2015 conference today, Qualys announced a free asset inventory service delivered via the cloud based on the same agent software the company uses to deliver security intelligence services.
Looking to unify asset management and security intelligence using the same lightweight 2MB agent software, Sumedh Thakar, chief product officer for Qualys, says that information Qualys AssetView gathers is fed back into a NoSQL Elasticsearch repository that IT organizations can use to discover the status of any piece of equipment running the Qualys Cloud Agent Platform (CAP) software.
Thakar says that when it comes to security and asset management, one of the challenges that Qualys faces as a cloud service is getting its agent software widely distributed. The free asset management service provides IT organizations with an incentive to distribute Qualys CAP software widely. At the same time, Qualys CAP reduces the number of agents that IT organizations need to distribute on endpoints by providing software that can feed information back to Qualys AssetView and the Qualys Vulnerability Management and Qualys Policy Compliance services.
The Qualys CAP agent tracks changes in state of the IT infrastructure it’s deployed on in the background, including any new images that get deployed on that system after the Qualys agent software is installed. The end result, says Thakar, is a set of persistent snapshots of the IT environment that organizations can search any time they like.
One of the challenges that IT organizations face today is a proliferation of agent software on endpoints that are designed to support a wide range of IT management tasks that ultimately wind up sapping resources on those clients. While it may not be possible to rationalize all those agents, the Qualys CAP agent is at the very least a free step in the right direction.
