IT Discovery in 2023: Predictions

The IT asset management (ITAM) market is set to undergo some profound changes over the next five years. Emerging technologies will continue to disrupt existing models, while data generated by new devices and applications will increase exponentially. As a result, ITAM leaders will need to rethink how they approach discovery, as well as re-examine their approach to managing and using data effectively.

The ‘hive mind’ of IT asset discovery tools will empower administrators with a comprehensive view of the IT environment. By leveraging multiple products to work together and share data, admins will be able to easily find and manage assets, automate discovery tasks, and quickly identify issues in their networks.

IT asset discovery tools have evolved tremendously over the last decade. From first-generation discovery solutions that could only be installed on one management platform to today’s lists of dozens of products that cross-reference information to identify and report on IT assets, administrators have never had more flexibility in their discovery tools. 

But what will IT asset discovery look like in the next year? Join us as we discuss the future of IT discovery and look at the latest IT discovery trends and how customers can use their existing resources to get more from their investments in these products by leveraging them together.

1. The era of remote and hybrid work is here to stay

Before the pandemic forced companies to rethink their workforces, many firms rushed to implement unmanaged out-of-the-box solutions for their remote workers. But with the recognition that remote work is here to stay and companies can’t afford to rebuild multiple times, most are revisiting those early choices and replacing them with more customized, cost-effective solutions assembled from multiple, best-of-breed technology products.

With the rapidly rising remote or hybrid workforce, companies need a comprehensive IT discovery solution that makes it easier to detect and record complete hardware and software inventory, periodically scan computers to have up-to-date data, manage software licenses and track software usage statistics, group similar software and manage their licenses as a single unit, and integrates easily with existing systems to provide granular view of the assets scattered across geographies. 

Read: Why your next IT asset discovery tool must include multi-cloud support

2. The inevitable rise of the cloud and asset migration

Moving forward, asset discovery will evolve to include cloud-based models and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. This shift is expected to eclipse traditional approaches within the next few years as more organizations move toward flexible and scalable systems that can provide real-time insight into their data.

In the wake of the pandemic and a wave of cloud migration, IT discovery has come under a microscope. Organizations are looking for ways to create more strategic and targeted plans, as well as gain better visibility into what’s left to migrate. 

We’re at the beginning of a shift in how companies view their data. Many companies are planning large-scale, strategic migrations to the cloud, but the number and size of these projects are still relatively small. 

However, more and more companies will begin to rely on asset-driven discovery and rationalization planning to help them prioritize what’s left to migrate, driving more focused migration efforts going forward. Asset-driven discovery enables planners to create actionable plans for migration, and releases teams from manually gathering data across disparate systems.

3. The growing need for cyber asset management and granular views to combat security threats

IT discovery is no longer about the technology itself – it’s about the people who use it. And we’re at a turning point in the way IT discovery is being done. 

Employees are at risk of having their computers, mobile devices, or other personally-owned technology (POT) infected with zero-click exploits that remotely bypass authentication and bring an intrusion into the enterprise network. In addition, technologies like IoT devices increase this risk further by enabling hackers to pivot with greater efficiency from an initial compromised computer or device to other targets within an enterprise network through lateral movement within a network or by targeting POT. 

These types of attacks blur the line between what employees can do to secure the enterprise (such as protecting their passwords and resisting social engineering attacks like phishing) and where cyber asset management is needed against threats to employee accounts and devices that rely less on user behaviors.

The need for more granular views of an organization’s IT assets will be needed to address evolving compliance concerns. The sheer volume of data will be overwhelming. It will be more than you can make sense of by yourself.

To address this challenge, organizations will need to develop and switch to new tools and processes that allow them to quickly analyze large amounts of data without sacrificing accuracy or quality.

4. The rise of AIOps and automated discovery solutions to handle the complexity of cloud and hybrid environments

As organizations move to cloud and hybrid deployments, the need for AIOps solutions to handle the complexity of these environments will increase. This is leading to a rise in on-premises data center environments, which adds a layer of complexity that must be addressed by AIOps platforms. 

As the technology landscape continues to change at a rapid pace, enterprises are increasingly adopting multi-cloud and hybrid architectures. The transition to these solutions requires strong management capabilities in order to keep up with all the moving pieces of a growing infrastructure, including assets and their dependencies. With several vendors involved in hybrid deployments, supported service levels escalating, accelerated innovation delivery, and in-house automation initiatives coming into play, it’s important for organizations to be able to understand what they own and how it relates to other systems on their network. This is where discovery software comes into play.

The need to quickly and efficiently discover anomalies across various types of data (memory, performance, log files, etc.) is driving the need for automated discovery solutions. To address this challenge, we’re seeing more solutions offering advanced tagging and metadata management capabilities for advanced cybersecurity.

Find out: How Virima IT Discovery helps with service delivery

Moving into the new year with a best-in-breed IT discovery tool

It’s clear that the IT discovery space is evolving rapidly. We can expect more vendors to enter this field in the next few years, and there will be more tools available for both IT and non-IT professionals alike. 

The key takeaway here is that it’s important to stay up-to-date on trends in order to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced world of technology — especially when it comes down to knowing what’s on your network or even just how much data you have stored across all devices!

Virima Discovery is a simple yet powerful platform for IT asset discovery that is easy to install, configure, and use. With agent-based and agentless discovery options, you can identify hundreds of thousands of assets within minutes. It’s an IP-based tool that lets you select subnets and ranges to scan. This IT discovery tool has hundreds of out-of-the-box reports, extendable IT asset discovery probes and sensors, and even a custom probe generator.

For data center, cloud, and edge environments with thousands of assets to discover, Virima’s intuitive, hybrid-cloud IT asset discovery software is your solution.Virima’s comprehensive platform provides both physical and virtual discovery of compute, network, and storage assets. 

Find out how you can reduce time to value with faster virtual machine deployment, improved security by reducing false positives, and increase visibility into the software running on your infrastructure with Virima Discovery and ViVID Service Mapping.