xAssets Asset Management Software Version 7.2
Summary
This release opens up new possibilities for customers with asset centric requirements.
It is market disrupting for both industry standard applications such as ITAM and also
enables custom solutions to be built in very short timescales.
The software is certified for US Air Force use in very high security networks (SIPRNET and NIPRNET).
It performs very well on very large networks and is suited to scenarios with complex network security.
Planned Release Schedule
All xAssets Version 7.2 products were released to systems integrators on the 9th April 2018.
Cloud sites will be released on 12th July 2018 and a program to upgrade all customers with
complex configurations will begin in Q3 2018.
Our policy is to provide equivalent licenses and upgrade services to all existing direct
customers free of charge provided it is commercially viable to do so and provided you have an existing
live support contract or cloud hosting with us. If it is not commercially viable
due to the complexity of your implementation we will present
options for upgrading which we expect to be affordable.
Background
For the past nine years, xAssets has been developing the technologies behind this release.
Many of these ground breaking technologies are software industry firsts, such as
a new generic single page application framework
and a new client side scripting language with similarities to Visual Basic,
which runs in a client browser such as Safari, Firefox or Google Chrome.
Some of these technologies were released into Version 6 and earlier Version 7 products to enable
our existing customers to receive benefits of these new technologies in advance of the full release.
However version 7.2 represents a huge change over previous versions in all respects and is the
culmination of a substantial research and development effort.
The application framework and client scripting language both benefit customers and xAssets.
xAssets will in future be able to build new
"out of the box" products in very short timescales.
Customers will be able to have their specific requirements met in very short timescales,
even for complex and unusual requirements where no other solution exists.
The data model changes represent a substantial improvement for customers.
Response times are now very fast, especially when combined with the new SPA client architecture.
The system can now deal with very large and complex networks stored in a single database,
less server capacity is needed, per-core licensing expenditure is reduced and
database administrative tasks are minimized.
Benefits
The key benefits are:
- Much shorter configuration times and more flexibility to meet complex requirements
- Huge scalability and performance improvements
- A new business intelligence suite for management reporting, management information and KPI reporting
- A new user interface which is very easy to use, fast, cross browser and mobile enabled
Ground Breaking Technologies
This is the first browser based enterpise application ever to utilise
Visual Basic-like scripts to code the client side behaviours such as validation,
business rules, on-screen logic and workflows.
This speeds development because of the benefits of code quality,
code validation, high level programming and no need for complex javascript mechanisms like closure and callbacks -
with these you
either limit a products flexibility or you make configuration of the product hugely complex -
with this new language it takes just a few lines of code to meet complex workflow requirements
with the same flexibility that would be possible with raw javascript
(which would require thousands of lines of code to implement the same business rules).
The server to client architecture follows a Single Page Application (SPA) model, where the page never entirely refreshes.
This architecture
is much faster because only content which changes needs to refresh,
and standing data items such as main menus are not refreshed frequently.
The application framework allows any functionality to be built quickly out of generic building blocks of forms, queries, menus and scripts.
This model is rarely used to build entire applications on a single generic framework but the power and flexibility of doing so
creates new possibilities in software development.
To make each database scale better we wanted to look beyond traditional database normalisation techniques and look at ways
of building databases that perform even faster within existing ACID database engines like Postgresql and Sql Server.
Our labs employed some recent research ideas related to extreme zipping technologies and found a great improvement over
recommended data modelling techniques while still keeping the data model intact.
Version 7.x products have been security tested by AFNIC and are now certified to run on
the US Air Force networks SIPRNET and NIPRNET.
This means the products have been
comprehensively and rigorously tested for vulnerabilities,
security features and other risk factors to ensure the highest possible standards in
coding, security and risk mitigation. The products are suitable for discovering and
managing assets in very high security networks and can manage very high security assets.
Summary of advantages of Version 7.2 over Version 6.x
- Highly secure and approved for use by the US Air Force for NIPRNET and SIPRNET
- Works on all modern browsers including mobile devices
- Performance and scalability improvements
- Very fast and easy to use user interface
- Improvements in configurability and speed of implementation
- Discovery has been updated to cover the latest permissions requirements include UX, SSH auth and SNMP V3