SOLIDserver 8.2: Enhancing Network Automation and Cloud Asset Management

With the Release 8.2 of SOLIDserver, IT teams including CloudOps, DevOps, and NetSecOps are provided with two new products that strengthen their capability to better view cloud instances and network objects to accelerate their automation journey, increasing their agility and help decision-making to sustain business needs. Complementary benefits can be envisaged around enhanced cost control, risk management, and meeting compliance.

These significant benefits are brought by the following two major products introduced with Release 8.2:

Cloud Observer: Centralized Visibility Over All Your Clouds Assets

Cloud Observer automatically discovers, tracks, and consolidates all cloud instances in public or private clouds, offering IT staff a unified view from one single pane of glass.

For today’s infrastructures, IT staff are often unsure of what’s running on their network.

With the rapid adoption of Multi-Cloud, IT departments are not always aware of all the new applications and services being produced by NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams, so they no longer have accurate visibility over components in their clouds. As a result, the attack surface is unknown, causing Shadow IT risks for example, and importantly, controlling cloud costs has become extremely difficult.

To help overcome these challenges, EfficientIP Cloud Observer equips IT teams with a secure, powerful, easy-to-use discovery tool for viewing, tracking, and consolidating information on networking and computing objects such as VMs and IPs, across all your cloud environments. So you can now get a unified view of your cloud objects from a Single Pane of Glass. The data is kept up-to-date and accurate thanks to plugins that discover instances and related networking. And what’s exciting is that it covers multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well VMware vCenter and others.

By harmonizing data coming from different cloud providers into the same data model, Cloud Observer opens up a host of valuable use cases. IT staff can get an exhaustive breakdown of cloud objects across ALL clouds, by region, by department, and more. That means your cost control can be improved.

In addition, Cloud Observer makes sure that all information collected is automatically kept up-to-date and accurate, including their state. 

Cloud Observer brings significant benefits around cost optimization and operational efficiency, enriching your network management, orchestration, and compliance.

To learn more about how it works, feel free to take a look at the following video:

Network Object Manager: Source of Truth Repository for Your Network Objects

Network Object Manager brings IT, staff, the capability of constructing a comprehensive, trusted, and open repository of network objects, which can be used for designing their network topology as well as jump-starting their automation journey.

In a world of increasing IT complexity with a multitude of components, IT departments are being asked to accelerate their automation journey. But for that, they need absolute confidence in the accuracy of their data. Many companies currently have to handle silos of data, containing out-of-date information, disconnected and spread across the organization. This causes a range of issues, including: 

• 1) Risk management capability becomes severely impacted
• 2) Proper network capacity planning is harder to perform
• 3) Rollout of new applications is time-consuming, and almost certainly error prone

To help overcome these challenges, EfficientIP came up with a new way to think about your network, which we call Network Object Manager (NOM). Network Object Manager offers your IT staff the ability to construct their single source of truth repository of network objects, which can be used to model your network topology. Above all, NOM’s trusted data is a strong asset that truly serves as the foundation of network automation, bringing the unparalleled ability to manage the lifecycle of network objects in physical, virtual and cloud environments. By leveraging its APIs, you can jump-start your automation journey and truly benefit from zero-touch operations. In addition, NOM’s actionable meta-data also provides important value to SOCs, helping them detect and remediate threats faster. That’s something your security team will surely appreciate!

With its consolidated repository, NOM permits many valuable use cases. From the intuitive interface, you can design any network topology with the ability to create, check, modify, and delete any network objects. Having your data always up-to-date and in line with your plan is a big help for solid capacity planning.

Another use case would be around helping get started with infrastructure-as-code. NOM’s data can feed automation processes through APIs, to ensure objects are rapidly deployed according to the plan. This avoids human errors brought by time-consuming manual tasks while improving operational efficiency.

In conclusion, harnessing the trusted inventory of Network Object Manager brings major benefits around improving overall efficiency through streamlining of automation processes, as well as easing network capacity planning and enhancing overall network security and compliance.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Network Object Manager functionality, please check the Network Object Manager web page and contact us for a demo.