Asset management is foundational to security. Put simply, you can’t protect what you can’t see or understand.
But with IT complexity on the rise, gaining visibility across diverse asset types has become an uphill struggle for many IT and security teams. In fact, according to our latest research:
- 72% of survey respondents reported increased complexity in their environments over the past two years
- Many report widening visibility gaps in their cloud infrastructure (79%), end-user devices (75%), and IoT devices (75%)
Gaining visibility across diverse types of assets requires an approach that automatically and continuously discovers assets in their environment.
But many of the tools used today only offer individual pieces of the asset puzzle. This results in several different silos of data, making it incredibly difficult to ask simple questions that span the different sources.
Plus, traditional asset inventory approaches are manual, error-prone, and time-consuming.
The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way. All the data you need already exists. Plus, the solutions that know about your assets have APIs.
All you need is a way to collect, correlate, and take action.
Our latest white paper “Why Asset Management Fails for Cybersecurity (and How to Fix It)” explores asset management in the context of six specific cybersecurity use cases. You’ll learn:
- Why asset management for cybersecurity is foundational to an array of security use cases
- The asset management challenges associated with these use cases and how they impact cybersecurity
- How to solve each use case with asset management for cybersecurity
Asset Management for Cybersecurity: Use Cases
Asset management is imperative to a range of cybersecurity use cases ranging from device discovery, incident response, vulnerability management, GRC and audit, or anything in between.
Take device discovery, for instance. With so many connected devices both on a network and remote, gaining a credible and comprehensive asset inventory can be a daunting task.
Plus, ephemeral devices add another layer of complexity. Left unmanaged, ephemeral devices can drive up an organization’s attack surface. Given their transient nature, ephemeral devices are usually unaccounted for in asset inventories created using traditional methods.
But tools built for cybersecurity asset management can offer continuous asset discovery capabilities to identify and manage ephemeral devices. This is done by connecting to the management consoles of platforms where these short-lived devices are created.
Let’s look at another use case: GRC and audit and how asset management for cybersecurity can help.
Stale inventory information can adversely affect governance, risks, and compliance programs. When dealing with asset management for compliance and audits, common challenges include:
- Accurately tracking and accounting for all in-scope assets in an organization’s environment
- Unifying and analyzing data from disparate sources across the organization
Asset management for cybersecurity can continuously gather inventory of in-scope assets and help organizations understand the configuration of each asset. This is done by aggregating data from different data sources, discovering which devices are unmanaged or misconfigured, and understanding whether every asset adheres to or deviates from security policies.
For cybersecurity asset management to deliver its full potential, it needs to be automated, continuous, and easy to implement.
By connecting to all of the security and management solutions that know about assets, a cybersecurity asset management solution like Axonius:
- Provides customers with a credible, comprehensive, and always up-to-date asset inventory
- Shows where they have coverage gaps to know any time an asset deviates from their security policies
- Automatically validates policies and lets customers decide what automated actions to trigger any time an asset doesn’t adhere to their policy
Check out the white paper to take a deep dive into why asset management as we know it fails for cybersecurity — and how to fix it.
