Glossary

What is involved with CSAM?

Cybersecurity asset management typically involves the following:

1. Identifying and maintaining an accurate inventory of all IT assets
2. Identifying any security gaps with these resources
3. Enforcing security requirements to address the gaps

Top Cybersecurity Asset Management challenges

Organizations face the following key challenges when managing cyber assets:

1. Aggregating asset data. Gathering a comprehensive asset inventory is essential to cybersecurity asset management. How can you manage and secure what you don’t know about? In order to get the most accurate inventory possible, you need to pull data from every possible source.
2. Finding unmanaged devices. Identifying unmanaged devices is critical to asset management — but it’s also notoriously headache-inducing.
3. Inventorying at scale. For enterprises, inventorying all assets is a major issue. Standard device inventories alone present significant challenges, let alone inventories of newer assets like cloud instances or IoT devices. Plus, asset inventories at scale take long to compile — like, 80 hours long.
4. Managing compliance. Without a comprehensive inventory, it's impossible to understand whether all assets adhere to or deviate from compliance requirements. And manual compliance enforcement can be tedious and difficult to maintain.

Risks of not managing cyber assets

Poor cybersecurity asset management increases the chances that a cyber criminal will be able to access an organization’s IT assets. CSAM is essential to managing your cyber attack surface and mitigating risks in an efficient and consistent manner.