The list of threats that keep IT security professionals up at night can seem almost endless – and it gets longer every day. With the transformation and digitization of business, IT security has never been more important or under more pressure from both internal and external sources. These challenges include:

1. The number and intensity of outside security attacks continues to grow.
2. Thanks to shadow IT, sensitive data now lives everywhere.
3. Unused, inactive, and/or unidentified devices open penetration points for security attacks.
4. Third-party software, open source inventory, and unsecured assets outside the data center introduce new risk.
5. Regulatory standards continue to evolve, often with poorly defined processes that IT security teams must manually address.
6. Failure to meet compliance standards puts IT and the business at risk for time-consuming audits and expensive fines.
7. Business expectations continue to skyrocket, from the C-suite to individual users.
8. Information remains stuck in silos, so security and operations teams rely on outdated processes.
9. Outdated processes translate to poor service quality, unnecessary business downtime, and an environment that can’t scale with today’s multi-cloud reality.

This list is just the beginning, but the items on it have one thing in common: they can be addressed by the right IT asset discovery tool, like BMC Helix Discovery. While asset discovery and dependency mapping may seem tangential to IT security, it actually reduces risk across your organization by providing a confident and complete view of your data center and multi-cloud ecosystems.

How does visibility impact security? BMC Helix Discovery offers deep insight into your full infrastructure – from data center servers, cloud services, network, and storage to the mainframe. It gives you the information and insight you need to resolve known vulnerabilities with the least amount of risk while enabling faster response to security threats. With increased visibility and automation, you can proactively identify trends, abnormalities, and security vulnerabilities and remediate them before they impact the business.

BMC Helix Discovery specifically benefits IT security teams with five key features:

1. Streamlined data inventory to identify blind spots and unscanned systems and enable rapid assessment of known vulnerabilities.
2. Deep business service awareness when assessing and remediating vulnerabilities in key infrastructure and cloud resources.
3. A single point of reference for visualizing and reporting on resources in a distributed environment.
4. Full coverage of a distributed environment aligned with key business infrastructure to bridge the SecOps gap and provide more valuable reporting and remediation.
5. Application and business service context to security alerts via integration with your SIEM solutions.

Asset discovery and dependency mapping may traditionally be the realm of IT Ops, but it plays an increasing role in a holistic approach to both security and operations. Learn more about how BMC Helix Discovery mitigates risk, reduces business impact, and solves IT security challenges in the solution brief, Security Starts with BMC Helix Discovery: Reduce risk across your distributed environment with greater visibility, automation, and insight.

Containers have been a white-hot topic in software and infrastructure recently. Gartner has predicted that more than half of global enterprises will be running containers in production environments by 2020; it pegged adoption at less than 20% in 2017. Meanwhile, 451 Research expects the application container market to haul in nearly $2.7 billion in revenues in 2020, up from $762 million in 2016.

Container adoption is increasing because the technology is well-suited for our multi-cloud world. Containers make your workloads more dynamic and are often noted for the portability they enable across different environments. They also make these workloads ephemeral: You can spin up a new instance quickly, use it for as long as you need, and then effectively throw it out. Wash, rinse, repeat.

These dynamic, ephemeral workloads also pose challenges for IT teams, particularly around discovery and service management. Tracking each one of these containerized workloads could quickly become unmanageable. On the flip side, tracking nothing is a recipe for failure; the benefits of containers will get wiped out if you’re running them in the dark.

The fast food of compute

How do you ensure you’re maintaining full visibility in your environments in an efficient, scalable manner? What should you be populating and maintaining in your CMDB?

Let’s consider an analogy that might help: Think of containers as the technology equivalent of fast food. You order it, the order gets filled almost immediately, you consume it, and you move on. It’s fast, it fills a need, and you simply dispose of everything when you’re done. There’s no cleanup, no dishes, no maintenance required. And it’s pretty much always available when you want it again.

The analogy extends to IT service management. One reason why people eat fast food is that they know pretty much exactly what they’re going to get when the order arrives.

That’s not because they’re keeping a record of every cheeseburger they’ve ever eaten, though. Rather, they remember where and how they ordered it. They remember that they like how one chain prepares and delivers its burger more than another, and they like that it’s consistent. A Big Mac is a Big Mac, regardless of when and where you order one.

That’s how you should approach containers: Don’t try to track every single instance you spin up and down. Instead, track its configuration—how the burger was prepared, so to speak.

Focus on the details

Instead of the bun, condiments, and cook time, substitute the build, the service this workload is a part of, and the deployment tool used. And track all of this as it changes, too.

Don’t think about the container itself. The intricacies and dependencies of the configuration that governs that container are what you want flowing into your CMDB, so that you can track them in their present state as well as when they change.

The dynamic, ephemeral, and scalable nature of containers is part of their growing appeal to enterprise IT. Just remember that you want to track how the burger gets to the table—not the burger itself, or the packaging that gets tossed when it’s gone.