Many companies do not suspect that servers are run in their data centres that do not offer any benefits to their users. These machines only use electricity and place a burden on the IT budget.
Although IT administrators believe to be managing certain servers, these machines do not even exist. Other servers, in turn, were set up at some point without the knowledge of the network team. US system vendor Infoblox warns that, owing to their shadowy existence, misidentified or unidentified IT components tend to cause issues with compliance, reliability and security.
Clear warning signs for such machines include few or no DNS queries to or from an instance, and discrepancies in network devices, terminals and their connections between one another. Performance metrics such as transmission and reception figures can also indicate underutilised or redundant servers.
It is therefore imperative to reliably classify and identify all devices that are used in the network. Companies can only operate an efficient IT infrastructure when all the devices are documented and deviations are automatically detected and substantiated. (Source: Infoblox/bs)