Crosscode provides tools to automate IT governance in today's decentralized environments. Their Panoptics platform automatically discovers applications and databases, maps dependencies, and enables impact analysis of changes. The new Governance Operating System (GOeS) sits atop Panoptics and allows users to create rules that automate governance by alerting when changes violate rules. This helps revolutionize governance in a way that is compatible with modern development speeds.

1. Governance in the
Age of Cloud
Meeting the management challenges of
today’s decentralized IT environments

2. Governance in the Age of Cloud
- 1 -
It has never been harder to manage enterprise IT governance.
In today’s environment, speed and agility are the hallmarks of
success. Development teams are using new constructs such as
containers and cloud-native microservices to streamline and
accelerate their workflow. As a result, the development and
deployment lifecycle is now often measured in days or weeks,
rather than months or years.
Legacy governance approaches with their stodgy configuration
control boards and procedure manuals have little sway in this
environment. Nonetheless, the need for effective governance
models is greater than ever. The complexities of these distributed
systems are tremendous, as are the demands for reliability,
availability, integrity and security.
We at Crosscode believe that the answer to these governance
challenges lies in increased automation. We are committed to
providing tools that bring to governance the same level of power
and sophistication seen in contemporary infrastructure-as-code
and configuration management frameworks.
In this white paper we examine the many challenges presented by
the current IT landscape and then discuss our latest offerings and
how they can help revolutionize your organization’s IT
governance model.
Cloud adoption among medium and large enterprises is now at
virtually 100%. Not only do most large organizations report that
at least some of their infrastructure is cloud based, a growing
number (81% according to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud
report) have multi-cloud strategies. Enterprises are now not only
liberally mixing private and public clouds from multiple vendors,
they are following multiple, overlapping cloud computing models
as well.
In the current environment, a multi-cloud, multi-model strategy
makes good business sense. Rather than funneling the
organization’s resources into a one-size-fits-all solution, multi-
cloud frees the organization to pursue optimal solutions to
specific business needs.
The Ascendance
of the Cloud
Introduction
In the fast-paced,
decentralized, siloed
environment in which
most development now
occurs, the need for
effective governance is
greater than ever.
In the fast-paced,
decentralized, siloed
environment in which
most development now
occurs, the need for
effective governance is
greater than ever.

3. Governance in the Age of Cloud
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The cost of this freedom, and ideally the optimization, is
complexity. When applications are viewed as discrete, siloed
solutions meeting discrete, siloed business needs, this complexity
might seem trivial. However, when applications are viewed as
part of an integrated, cross-dependent enterprise, the complexity
can become overwhelming.
Another consequence of cloud adoption has been a widespread
decentralization of IT authority. While there has long been
something of a tug-of-war between the forces of centralized and
decentralized control of IT resources, IT departments of large
organizations have been accustomed to a certain measure of
authority over the management of applications and infrastructure.
The ascendance of the cloud has shifted the equation dramatically
in the direction of decentralization. Business units now expect the
authority to secure the resources they need, and large
organizations may have hundreds of teams building, deploying
and managing applications and infrastructure.
IT governance has many roles in the enterprise, not the least of
which is to ensure the adherence to established company
standards and accepted best practices in the procurement,
development and deployment of applications and infrastructure.
Despite the not-so-occasional grumblings of everyone from
development teams to business unit leadership, adherence to such
standards is critical to the integrity and long-term viability of the
organization’s IT infrastructure.
Good governance, for example, forces organizations to answer
mundane questions about data interoperability, thereby avoiding
potential headaches and costly rework down the road. Good
governance also forces organizations to audit for security
vulnerabilities which left unchecked might expose the
organization to significant harm.
In the fast-paced, decentralized, siloed environment in which
most development now occurs, when documentation exists at all
it is inadequate. There is a lack of visibility into how applications
The Governance
Gap

4. Governance in the Age of Cloud
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interact with each other and into the dependencies among
applications.
Change in this context becomes very hard. Developers and
architects avoid application changes for fear of unintended
consequences and the breaking other applications. The results of
this reluctance being the very opposite of the efficiency, flexibility
and agility promised by cloud.
While so many elements of the application and infrastructure
lifecycle have become virtualized and automated, until now
governance has remained stubbornly manual. It should surprise
no one that a manual governance model is incompatible with the
current landscape. The decentralization of IT management makes
it easy to sidestep any standards viewed as inconvenient. More
critically, the breakneck, deadline driven pace under which
modern development teams labor makes true adherence to
published standards impractical at best.
Crosscode’s solutions attack the governance gap head-on by
automating critical elements of your IT architecture management
and governance activities. Since 2015, our Crosscode Panoptics
Platform has been revolutionizing the way organizations manage
their distributed IT architectures. Panoptics now features the
Governance Operating System (GOeS) which brings unique
capabilities to automate governance rule checking across the
enterprise.
Panoptics automatically discovers all the applications and
databases running in your enterprise, analyzes them, and
generates a detailed map of their dependencies. The analysis
performed if quite deep. Panoptics can interpret byte code for
many languages as well as binary code, mapping your
applications down to the method level, and your databases down
to the column level.
The dependency mapping produced by Panoptics enables you to
select any class, packet package (library) or method in any library
in an application and see instantly how it interacts with other
How Crosscode
Helps
The decentralization of
IT management makes
it easy to sidestep any
standards viewed as
inconvenient.

5. Governance in the Age of Cloud
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applications and databases. Likewise, you can select any
database table or column and see its dependencies in detail.
Armed with these highly detailed dependency mappings,
Panoptics enables instant impact analysis for even the most
complex scopes of work. You can see at a glance how changes to
even one line of code will impact other applications and databases
across your system. Panoptics mitigates the risk of costly
disruptions to business systems by revealing the full potential
impact of proposed IT changes before new code is even planned,
much less pushed into production.
With the addition of GOeS, Panoptics users can now go beyond
analysis and planning, and use the insights of the enterprise-wide
mappings to automate governance. GOeS sits on top of Panoptics’
dependency mappings. Using GOeS you create custom rules to
govern changes at the most detailed level. GOeS sends you an
alert on the platform of your choice whenever a change doesn’t
comply with one of your rules.
GOeS rules are created using an easy and intuitive scripting
language. A sample rule is pictured below.
Rules can be configured to execute anytime an element such as a
method, class or database is added, deleted or updated. Rules can
also execute when various conditions are met such as when a
change creates a new dependency or creates a new security issue.
Crosscode runs an agent on your application and database
servers. The agent extracts the operating system process and
database structures and sends them to the Crosscode server over a
two-way TLS connection with certificate pinning.
How Crosscode
Works
Panoptics discovers
the applications and
databases running in
your enterprise and
generates a detailed
map of dependencies.

6. Governance in the Age of Cloud
- 5 -
The Crosscode Cloud application uses patent-pending specialized
algorithms to make sense of the structural metadata coming in
from your servers. The metadata is stitched together into the
dependency mapping that underlies Crosscode’s many powerful
features. The mapping can be visualized on a user’s screen,
viewed in decomposition mode as detailed lists of dependencies,
or accessed for impact analysis and governance rule making.
The Crosscode agent is called csPlugin. It is a lightweight agent
that runs as a service on your servers and reads information about
the processes and the databases running on those servers.
For each process running on the server, csPlugin determines if the
application is supported by Crosscode. If so, csPlugin uses a
variety of techniques, including looking at code annotations and
bytecode injection, to extract the structure of the application.
For programs that have been written in older languages which do
not support introspection, csPlugin uses a range of techniques
(including library injection) to determine the structure of the
application. For relational databases, csPlugin extracts the entity-
relationship information and other connection information from
the database and sends that information to the Crosscode server.
Crosscode Panoptics Platform
The csPlugin agent is installed on your
servers where it extracts operating system
processes and database metadata.
key point. To place this text box anywhere
The metadata is sent to the Crosscode cloud
application where it is analyzed and the
dependency map generated.
Visualizations and reports are available
to authorized users via any HTML5
compatible browser.
For each process
running on the server,
csPlugin uses a
variety of techniques,
including looking at
code annotations and
bytecode injection, to
extract the structure
of the application.

7. Governance in the Age of Cloud
- 6 -
When implementing Crosscode, csPlugin can be deployed in
minutes from Crosscode servers via the internet. It can also be
baked into the server image. Once the csPlugin is running on
your servers with the privileges required to access application and
database metadata, results can be viewed by logging into the
Crosscode dashboard via an HTML5 compatible browser.
Crosscode draws on the experience of leaders from different
backgrounds, locations, and industries to create one revolutionary
product. We’ve seen the challenges you face first hand and are
committed to bringing forth tools to modernize IT architecture
management.
Crosscode President and CEO Aditya Sharma founded the
company in 2015. He conceptualized the Crosscode platform after
spending over 25 years working for large enterprise companies
like HP, Cisco, IBM, and UHG and personally experiencing the
challenges that prevent companies from quickly making changes
to their technology, due to the complexity of their enterprise.
www.crosscode.com
About Crosscode