What Is Asset Integrity Monitoring (AIM)?

What is Asset Integrity Monitoring (AIM)?

The answer: Asset Integrity Monitoring is ensuring the physical integrity of computing infrastructure, whether it is in a data center, in a colocation facility, or on the edge. It is the process by which assets are protected from being either intentionally or unintentionally compromised.

All the applications and data in an organization depend on a safe and secure physical workload infrastructure. Data center infrastructure can be compromised when personnel make unplanned or unrecorded changes to assets, or through intentional breaches. Most of the time, this compromise is not malicious; just the result of good people making bad mistakes when they:

• Make incorrect/unplanned/unauthorized changes
• Perform changes at unauthorized times
• Fail to record these changes centrally
• Turn off supporting equipment
• Introduce new assets, which negatively affect operations
• Fail to be aware of all firmware and software patches which might introduce vulnerabilities

Nlyte, a leader in workload physical asset management, provides DCIM software and Discovery solutions that help get an Asset Integrity Monitoring program up and running.  See how Nlyte can help you to avoid physical infrastructure compromises, in just four phases:

Phase One: Discovery

The first step is of course to identify all the assets connected to the network. Nlyte’s Discovery automates the process of IT inventory discovery with a proprietary agentless tool which is protocol, platform and vendor agnostic. It provides detailed information about hardware, software, etc.

Phase Two: Change Management Software

During this phase, a baseline of all assets, power systems, processes, (ITIL, ITSM, DCIM) and activities is established. This allows the review and strengthening of asset lifecycle management, and the tracking of all changes to the physical infrastructure, whether in the data center, in a multi-tenant/hosting facility or even on the edge. When changes are tracked from a central location, it can be determined which assets may be at risk, and workflow becomes the single source of truth for all work to be performed in the data center.

Phase Three: Data Center & Power Usage Monitoring

With the baseline established, IT Operations can compare the current state of the assets against the baseline inventory to spot inconsistencies and change management non-compliance.

Phase Four: Alerting and Reporting

Real-time asset monitoring enables the identification of unplanned/unauthorized asset changes, and the generation of alerts and exception reports for any action that was not approved. Automated asset discovery tracks adds, moves, and removes and uncovers unknown assets. Scans of the computing infrastructure provide reports of all software versions and patches and firmware present on hardware to identify any know violations and or vulnerabilities. Reports also enable validation of resource availability for SLAs.