Today, Identify Software announced that its AppSight Black Box software, can help organizations mitigate the risk of migrating their applications to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, so they can reap the security benefits of this important upgrade much faster, by significantly accelerating the testing and rollout process.
“IT teams need a way to move forward with this Service Pack faster and more confidently, so they can take advantage of its important security enhancements,” said Identify’s CEO, Yochi Slonim. “Identify’s AppSight Black Box software can be a tremendous help as organizations plan their rollout effort, because it provides deep visibility into the application execution–from the user level, to system interactions, down to the code–so if an application fails after the upgrade, as it very well may, AppSight will help IT staff and application developers quickly pinpoint why so they can resolve the issue.”
Identify’s AppSight uses patented Black Box software to capture a synchronized, real-time log of enterprise application system events, conditions, and configuration–much like the black box flight recorder on an aircraft captures aeronautic parameters. The AppSight Black Box forensic log can be replayed and analyzed to quickly pinpoint the root cause of all kinds of application problems, whether related to performance, configuration issues, user mistakes, or code errors. AppSight allows IT professionals to simply replay, rather than recreate the problem and proceed directly to solving it–eliminating up to 80 percent of the cycle time usually consumed by root cause analysis.
“Windows XP SP2 is one of the most significant software releases ever,” said Glenn O’Donnell, program director at META Group, a leading provider of IT research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. “SP2 is viewed by most as a mandatory update, but organizations must perform thorough testing to ensure success. Tools that can model application structure and behavior and reflect relevant infrastructure relationships can help simplify and accelerate this due diligence process. The result is a smoother transition to SP2 with minimal disturbance to business services.”
AppSight can significantly reduce the “shake out” time associated with a major upgrade like XP SP2 because it can record and analyze applications throughout the application lifecycle, including while they are running in the live production environment.
“For example,” says Eldad Maniv, Identify’s VP of product management, “SP2’s new security features may block certain components from talking to others, causing an application to break. Or, an application may not run well with Windows XP’s new firewall defaults. A migration team can use AppSight to capture ‘gold logs’ of the application as it runs well in production under XP, then record it again running under XP SP2 to see the differences at all levels of execution and quickly pinpoint the problem areas. Using AppSight, you would be able to see the exact list of configuration parameters that the application accessed that were different. This immediately reduces the time for root cause analysis and problem resolution.”
“Lab testing is a critical step in the rollout or upgrade of any business-critical application, but there’s no way to adequately test for all the possible scenarios and anomalies encountered ‘in the wild’ when thousands or millions of end-users interact with the app. for the first time,” says Maniv . “That’s where AppSight really sets itself apart, because it’s the only solution that can off that same level of application insight from pre- to post- production.”
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