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08-22-2018 12:55 PM
I'd concur with Mike that you raise this in the Discovery section. However, I'd like to address your statement about wanting to exclude some software. I do understand that there are some titles an organization simply isn't concerned with. However, it is still important to scan and return everything. Here are a couple of reasons:
1. If you are audited what you have omitted could potentially burn you. Licensing models are fluid and software title ownership is transferred between publishers. What you didn't care about yesterday, could become a liability tomorrow. It's better to scan and have visibility but not act on the data until it is needed vs. not having it at all.
2. Precluding scan of something may accidentally preclude the scan of something else which could be of major importance. I recently spoke to a customer who didn't want visibility of any software save a few select titles. This is a narrow mindset which gives great clarity to the few titles but doesn't protect the enterprise from rogue software installation. If you somehow preclude visibility to a few titles, you have no idea when something licensable and costly has been introduced into the environment outside of a governed process.
3. Security Considerations. Similar to my argument in number two above, if you limit visibility you won't return a footprint for software which may be installed outside of process. Some of these titles may pose a security threat to the network. As your organization's SAM Practice matures, you'll want to leverage the data in our SAM Professional product for use by your Security teams. You won't be able to do that if you limit what you scan for.