If you are building a software related to Cloud environments, you will need to get all of your customer’s cloud resources first. For example, let’s say you want to build a threat modeling tool to give your customers the ability to add threat information to their Cloud/On-premise resources and for the resources to communicate between themselves. As a first step, you will need to extract all of the information from your customer’s environment. That’s where Cloudockit can help you!
Extract Normalized Cloud Asset Information & Dependencies to Feed a Third-Party Application
How Can Cloudockit Help You Scan Your Cloud Assets?
Cloudockit can help you by removing all of the complexities to securely scan and retrieve your customer’s resources, Cloud and On-premise, and also retrieve the links between each resource.
The following image provides an overview of how Cloudockit can help you with extracting cloud asset information to feed a third-party application.
Extracting Normalized Cloud Asset Information For All Platforms!
Scheduled/API
Cloudockit works through an API that can be scheduled or called programmatically. The API runs in a container that lives in your customer’s environment to ensure the scanning process is done within your customer’s site and that none of their credentials leave their environment.
Cloudockit scans your customer’s environment and currently supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMWare, and HyperV. What is really important at this step is to understand that the Cloudockit scanning process is happening inside your customer’s environment which ensures maximum security and no credentials are ever going to leave your customer environment.
A Complete JSON File
Once the scan is completed, Cloudockit will generate a complete JSON File and drop it in a storage of your choosing. It will also send you a notification for you to retrieve the JSON.
The file that we generate contains all of the information you need and:
- The file is completely normalized across the different platforms in order to receive the same standard categories, TBM/Apptio, and Cloudockit categories. For example, you know that EC2 Instances and Azure Virtual Machine are the same types of components and you get a normalized field for CPU/RAM
- The file contains all the properties of each object
- Links between all of the components. Multiple types of links exist including connection (a VM is connected to a disk) or aggregation (A VPC/VNet is an aggregation of the subnet)
- A complete (HTML/Markdown format) documentation for each object
- Each object has a complete diagram
- Normalized billing information is available in the file
- All of the geographical properties with Lat/Long, countries, etc.
- All of the Compliance Rules built-in Cloudockit and the ones provided by the Cloud providers (Azure Security Center, AWS Trusted Advisor, GCP Security Center) are available in the file
For more information on the normalized extraction visit Cloud Asset Normalization
For more information on the JSON file visit Cloudockit JSON Format Description
Import Data to Your Software
Once Cloudockit has finished produce the JSON files and all the diagrams, a webhook will let your application knows that it can retrieve the data on a secure link.
Why Should You Use Cloudockit to Extract Normalized Information?
After reading the following list, you will realize that the question is a no brainer:
- Maintaining scripts to scan resources is a day-to-day task that requires a lot of manpower. Cloudockit has more than 30 employees continuously maintaining Cloudockit. If you do not keep your scans up to date, they will become obsolete and your customers could lose confidence in your software
- Developing your own scanning behavior is error prone. At Cloudockit, we already have thousands of users, many in huge companies, that scan their environments every day. We are confident that we do not have errors in our scans
- Security is key and you need to understand that you cannot provide scanning as part of your hosted solution. This means that you will need to deploy components on your customer’s sites and keep it up to date. Such a task is a very time consuming and can prevent you from focusing on the real value of your software
- Scanning is not the only thing Cloudockit does well, you will also enjoy the links between components, compliance rules, documentation, changes, diagrams, and more. The best part is that you won’t need to redevelop and maintain it all those features
- We are trusted by multiple cloud providers and approved in their marketplace
