Shadow IT and unmanaged asset discovery

What shadow IT looks like in practice

Shadow IT is the gap between what the network contains and what the record says it contains. MagenX assesses that gap from one installer on hardware you control, reading Active Directory and network topology together, then comparing what answers on the wire against what the directory claims exists.

What is examined

Discovery covers the objects that tend to fall out of inventory:

• Devices answering on the network with no matching directory record
• Hosts with no identifiable owner
• Disabled and stale objects that are still reachable
• Who joined a machine to the domain, and when

What you get out of it

Unmanaged assets are placed in the same graph as the directory, network and firewall layers, so an unknown host is shown with the routes that reach it rather than as an isolated line in a list. Scheduled scans build an append-only change history, so anything that appears between runs is recorded as an arrival rather than found again from scratch.

FAQ