Abstract: A holistic approach protects serverless applications in various cloud and/or non-cloud data center computing environments. An illustrative data storage management system deploys, or causes to be deployed, a discovery tracker function in a customer's cloud service account. The discovery tracker identifies and tracks what applications are executing therein, whether they are already known to the illustrative system or not. This aspect ensures that the system is up-to-date with a customer's cloud deployments, so that it may timely back up active applications, and conversely, so that it may dispose properly of copies of applications that are no longer deployed. The discovery tracker discovers application assets, relationships, and interoperability dependencies. The illustrative system creates a corresponding “application entity” that references the various assets. An orchestration function coordinates storage management operations to generate a set of copies of the application's discovered assets.