A Tool for Automatic Enterprise Architecture Modeling

Abstract

Abstract. Enterprise architecture is an approach which aim to provide decision support based on organization-wide models. The creation of these models is however cumbersome as multiple aspects of an organization need to be considered. The Enterprise Architecture approach would be signi cantly less demanding if data used to create the models could be collected automatically. This paper illustrates how a vulnerability scanner can be utilized for data collection in order to automatically create enterprise architecture models. We show how this approach can be realized by extending an earlier presented Enterprise Architecture tool. An example is provided through a case study applying the tool on a real network.

An architecture framework for enterprise IT service availability analysis

“…Furthermore, to alleviate the workload when creating enterprise architecture models, data to populate models with entities and relations can be collected automatically [8]. This is a promising road ahead, in particular as one of the practitioner concerns listed above is the increasing complexity and decreasing understandability of enterprise architectures.…”

“…Finally, automated data collection, in the spirit of [8], is an interesting future direction. The difficulty of obtaining and maintaining data is often highlighted as a key difficulty with the enterprise architecture discipline.…”

“…. .xn) (8) It follows from Eq. (3) that such a model preserving merger requires the following equality to hold:…”

Automated Discovery and Maintenance of Enterprise Topology Graphs

“…Farwick et al [27] presents organizational processes to discover and maintain EAs. Buschle et al [13] map the network scan output of the vulnerability scanner Nexpose onto the technology layer of an EA model. Our approach has more depth and breadth in discovery because it covers the complete enterprise IT from infrastructure to processes (cf.…”

“…Such models can be discovered manually, but this is a time-consuming, costly, and error-prone task [7]. Existing solutions are either restricted to a particular scope (e. g., discovery on the level of network [8], [9], storage [10], [11], application configuration [7], or application [12]), focus on other aspects than analyzing, optimizing, and adapting IT (e. g., monitoring, license management, vulnerability scanner), address a different level of granularity (e. g., enterprise architecture documentation [3], [13], [14]), or do not discover instance information at all (e. g., software architecture reconstruction [15] or application topologies in deployment automation solutions [16], [17]). An approach covering enterprise IT from business process to infrastructure offering an extensible framework for existing solutions that enables developers to provide plugins has not been created yet.…”