Why Asset Management Matters for Cybersecurity Now More Than Ever

The need to gather information about vulnerabilities, system configurations, and security solution coverage across the enterprise has never been more important. Noah Simon, director of product marketing, Axonius, discusses how cybersecurity asset management provides greater visibility into the enterprise environment to ensure better protection and compliance.

A new, integrated approach to asset management is streamlining security tracking and enforcement, providing more visibility into the enterprise environment and better protection. 

The once-clear lines between IT and security are fading, one watershed moment after another. First, the industry ramped up for remote work, and now we are preparing for whatever hybrid configuration comes with the “new normal.” And through it all, many organizations have been just one step away from a major security incident. An unaware or ill-intentioned employee, a user who disabled their AV software, or the wrong cloud setting might leave data exposed or cause other disruptions. 

The need to gather practical and timely data about vulnerabilities, system configurations, and the coverage of IT and security tools across the enterprise infrastructure has never been more important.

Yet keeping tabs on a dynamic and complex set of assets and global compliance policies has been a major pain point for the security industry, despite a suite of discrete tools developed just for this purpose. For example, today’s endpoint security and vulnerability assessment tools excel at identifying threats. But they cannot tell you which devices do not have an agent installed and therefore are not protected against malware and exploits. Likewise, more than half of today’s virtual machines reside on the public cloud, which means they are accessed by users with dynamic IPs not seen by VA scanners. Adding to the complexity, any updates to public cloud configurations need to be constantly monitored for compliance with required security frameworks such as NIST, PCI, or HIPAA. 

In fact, all security frameworks, benchmarks, and maturity models begin with knowing what you have. Traditionally, this process has been the responsibility of the IT department, which conducts a routine asset management audit and, ideally, maintains an asset inventory with a configuration management database (CMDB) or other solution. Every quarter or so, they begin the labor-intensive process of identifying all the IT components throughout the entire organization to update their inventory records, detect license management issues, assess assigned policies and accessibility, and determine which assets to retire. The goal is to catalog all assets and make sure the reality of the enterprise footprint aligns with its IT business and operational guidelines.

While building an asset inventory is necessary, the unfortunate limiting factor, considering all the work, is that the final audit only provides a static overview – A snapshot in time. When an incident occurs, security professionals need immediate, up-to-date information about a targeted system, a compromised device’s operating system, recent patches, who has logged in, relevant historical information, and a host of other data. By the time an incident occurs, it is likely the configuration of any asset potentially compromised has changed, leaving security teams to conduct time-intensive, complex investigations. 

Learn More: How to Scale Cybersecurity as Your Startup’s Attack Surface Evolves

More Visibility Equals Fewer Intrusions 

One thing the industry has learned from the chaos and challenges of the pandemic is that a more timely and comprehensive view of the enterprise computing environment is sorely needed. Looking to the near future, four out of five organizations said they plan to invest in more asset management tools. This is according to “The Current State of the IT Asset Visibility Gap and Post-Pandemic Preparedness,” a survey Opens a new window of 500 information security and IT decision-makers across North America, EMEA, and APAC conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group for Axonius.

The prudence of this approach became apparent last year when organizations that reduced their security visibility gap reported 70% fewer cloud intrusions than those with less insight into their operations. Companies with more visibility saw an average of only three public cloud incidents, compared to an average of 10 incidents at companies with less visibility into their cloud operations, according to the ESG survey. 

Learn More: 5-Point Checklist to Fix Cybersecurity Threats That Loom Large

The Value of Asset Management in Cybersecurity

The old saying “you cannot secure what you cannot see” still rings true. Fortunately, in most cases, all the data needed to generate a credible, accurate, and up-to-date cybersecurity asset management system already exists but is lying fragmented and siloed across the enterprise. Companies need to integrate IT and security functionality used for all assets, streamlining the process to provide always-current inventory and in-depth security visibility. Key actions include gathering data from any source that provides detailed information about assets, correlating that data to produce a view of every asset and what is on it, continually validating every asset’s adherence to the overall security policy, and then creating automatic, triggered actions whenever an asset deviates from the policy.

By compiling data that already exists across the enterprise, security teams gain crucial visibility into all aspects of cybersecurity and compliance:

• Endpoint protection: Detect assets missing an endpoint agent or identify those with the right agent installed — but where the agent is not working.
• Vulnerability management: Uncover assets not being scanned by a vulnerability assessment tool.
• Cloud security: Find cloud instances not being scanned for vulnerabilities, that are misconfigured, or that are not adhering to industry benchmarks like CIS Foundations Benchmarks.
• Incident response: Use enriched, correlated data on assets from different data sources  to help expedite incident response investigations and remediation.
• Continuous controls monitoring: Automatically identify assets that stop adhering to your overall security policy and reduce the time and cost of audits.
• Security policy enforcement: Automatically address assets that do not adhere to your security policies.

Cybersecurity asset management puts the security professional in control and provides far greater visibility into the enterprise environment than manual, point-in-time audits. The system grabs all the data, exposes all occurrences outside of the expected policy, and allows the security professional to determine what action to take, automatically or manually if needed. This approach ensures that IT and security professionals can better protect end-users, corporate data and assets, and the community at large. 

Let us know if you liked this article or tell us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!