How an Asset Inventory Helps You Build Your Ransomware Resilience
Ransomware is one of the most pervasive cybersecurity threats today, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report highlights the continued danger, revealing that ransomware accounts for 23% of all breaches and is considered the top threat for 92% of industries. Ransomware is a form of malware that is designed to encrypt files on devices, making systems unusable until a ransom is paid. Attackers are financially motivated, often opting for tactics that yield the highest return on investment.
Ransomware attacks are almost impossible to prevent entirely. While you can implement various preventative measures, such as patching vulnerabilities and monitoring for malware, focusing solely on prevention isn’t enough. No matter how good your preventative measures are, attackers only need to be successful once.
With ransomware becoming increasingly inevitable, organizations must focus on their ability to survive an attack. Building cyber resilience—the ability to keep critical operations running during an attack and to recover quickly afterward—is essential for minimizing the impact of a ransomware attack. An accurate asset inventory plays a key role in achieving ransomware resilience.
A well-maintained asset inventory offers multiple benefits in the fight against ransomware:
Avoid paying the ransom: With a solid asset inventory and disaster recovery plan, you’ll be more likely to be able to recover your systems without paying attackers.
Recover from other disruptions: Cyber resilience doesn’t just help in ransomware cases—it applies to IT outages, natural disasters, and more.
Smarter resource allocation: By understanding asset criticality, you can better prioritize budget, time, and resources to where they are most needed.
Improved incident response: A comprehensive asset inventory aids rapid, real-time decision-making during a cyber incident, improving your organization’s response to threats.
Leverage your asset inventory to build ransomware resilience
1 Know how your business functions
Start by identifying the critical business functions your company depends on in order to survive. These can include business operations like finance, logistics, and customer service—not just IT infrastructure groupings like ‘Windows servers.’ By focusing on business outcomes, you can prioritize which systems need always to be up and running.
The process of identifying critical business functions involves creating a list of all the functions and processes within the organization. This list should include all internal and external activities that contribute to the overall functioning of the business. Once the list is complete, the next step is prioritizing the functions based on their criticality. This can be done through a risk assessment process that evaluates the potential impact on the organization of an outage of a given function. Knowing this information is crucial because it ensures that all stakeholders can align their efforts accordingly and helps you develop incident response plans and allocate resources effectively.
2 Know your environment: discover and inventory assets
An asset inventory is not just a list of existing hardware and software—it’s an evolving, constantly updated record of all assets in your environment, from on-premise servers to cloud infrastructure and even third-party systems. Asset discovery is the process of identifying and cataloging all assets within an organization's environment, continuously updating your asset inventory. This provides you with complete visibility into the full scope of your current asset infrastructure.
Legacy asset inventory solutions rely on aggregating lists of existing assets that you already know about. What they don’t do well is show you what you don’t know about. With asset discovery, you can discover assets in your environment that you didn’t know existed as well as identify assets that you thought you had but don’t exist anymore and weren’t removed from the database. On average, an enterprise infrastructure will evolve by 5-15% every month. This is why having an automated, constantly updated asset inventory is crucial.
3 Know how your environment works: map asset dependencies
The ability of your organization to recover swiftly and continue operations hinges on swiftly restoring the IT infrastructure supporting critical functions if it goes down. However, it’s not as simple as the IT team maintaining a list of servers. The assets supporting a function rely in turn on a complex network of dependencies. These include other internal functions, external third-party services, and broader infrastructure components. Mapping out these connections is essential to restoring operations systematically and effectively.
Identifying the relationships and interdependencies between assets as well as between assets and the critical business functions they support can make or break your ability to keep critical business functions running during an attack as well as to recover swiftly afterwards. It plays a crucial role in threat modeling, risk assessment, and the development of effective security strategies.
4 Understand asset criticality and resilience
Understanding each asset’s resilience (how easily it can be compromised, isolated, or backed up) and criticality (its importance to overall business continuity) allows you to understand its potential business impact in case of downtime. You can improve the resilience of the assets in your network by putting mitigation strategies into place. Knowing the relative criticality of your assets helps you prioritize where to focus your limited resources. It also helps guide incident response and disaster recovery planning. You generally won’t be able to restore every asset that has gone down immediately. Knowing which assets are most critical to the business allows you to prioritize essential components for rapid recovery.
5 Create your cyber resilience plan: ensuring business continuity and effective disaster recovery
Cyber resilience is essential for ensuring your business can continue operating during and after disruptions, including ransomware attacks or system failures. A strong cyber resilience plan includes a well-thought-out business continuity strategy and an effective disaster recovery plan. These two components work together to safeguard your critical operations and minimize the impact of potential disruptions.
Business continuity: keep essential functions running
A solid business continuity plan ensures the ongoing operation of essential business functions during and after a disruption. By conducting a risk assessment and business impact analysis, you can understand the potential consequences of system downtime, including operational, financial, and reputational impacts. Your asset inventory will provide the data needed to create realistic recovery plans, allowing you to prioritize resources where they are needed most.
Risk assessment
A risk assessment helps you identify the potential risks and threats that could impact your business. These can range from cyberattacks like ransomware to hardware failures or natural disasters. After identifying these risks, you’ll evaluate both the likelihood of these events occurring and their potential impact on your operations.
An accurate asset inventory plays a critical role in risk assessment by providing insights into the security posture of all your systems. It helps you:
Identify unmanaged or unauthorized assets (such as "shadow IT") that may pose security risks
Assess the risk profile of each asset based on its exposure to threats
Prioritize assets for better security management, so that you can ensure appropriate controls are in place for high-risk assets
Business impact analysis
Once risks are identified, a business impact analysis (BIA) is conducted to determine which business functions are most critical and to understand the potential effects of disruptions. The BIA considers the financial, operational, and reputational consequences of downtime.
An asset inventory supports this analysis by providing a full view of your organization’s infrastructure. It ensures that you have the data needed to:
Build realistic recovery plans
Perform effective testing of recovery strategies
Keep your knowledge of critical systems up to date as your infrastructure evolves
Disaster recovery: preparing for the worst
In the event of a disaster—whether it’s a cyberattack, system failure, or other major disruption—having a disaster recovery plan is essential to restore business operations quickly. An asset inventory is foundational to this planning process, as it gives you the necessary insights into which assets are critical to your operations, the key business functions that need to remain operational, and how different assets rely on one another to function. This improves system redundancy by identifying which systems should be prioritized for high availability and helps you ensure that critical assets are backed up, dependencies are accounted for, and the right systems can be restored in the correct order. This targeted approach reduces recovery times and costs, ensuring that your organization remains resilient.
Enhanced system redundancy
While redundant systems ensure continuity in case of system failures, it’s not always feasible or cost-effective to make every system redundant. Therefore, your disaster recovery plan should focus on your most critical IT systems and applications. An asset inventory helps you identify which assets support critical business functions so that you can correctly account for these assets in your disaster recovery planning. This ensures that resources are directed toward maintaining redundancy for the systems that support these functions, minimizing downtime.
Testing and updating your disaster recovery plan
A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its ability to work when needed. Regular testing ensures that the plan remains effective and that all assets and dependencies are properly accounted for. Understanding dependencies between different assets is key to bringing impacted systems back online quickly. For example, if one system depends on another to function, both need to be restored in the right order to avoid operational issues. As new assets are added to your environment, they should be dynamically integrated into your recovery plan to ensure their availability during a disaster. Testing your disaster recovery plan will reveal gaps or weaknesses, allowing you to make necessary updates and adjustments as your infrastructure evolves.
Conclusion
Ransomware is an ever-present threat, and preventing every attack is impossible. However, building your cyber resilience, aided by an accurate and constantly updated asset inventory, will give you the ability to keep essential operations running and recover faster when an attack occurs. By understanding your assets, their dependencies, and how they support critical business functions, you can prioritize recovery efforts and mitigate the overall impact of ransomware, turning a potentially devastating event into a manageable disruption.
Redjack for Cyber Resilience
Redjack revolutionizes asset inventory by adopting a business function perspective. It works by deploying lightweight sensors across your IT infrastructure, including cloud, container, and on-premises environments. These sensors analyze communication patterns and device behavior, discovering what assets exist in your environment and gathering detailed dependency data.
The Redjack cyber resilience platform aligns assets with your critical business functions, shifting your focus from IT-centric asset management to a business-centric perspective. It prioritizes assets based on their resilience and criticality, facilitating rapid recovery and business continuity planning.
By continuously monitoring changes in the IT environment, Redjack ensures that decision-makers have the real-time insight they need for informed, timely decisions, ultimately enhancing organizational resilience and reducing risk.
Contact us to learn how Redjack has been helping the CISOs of the world's largest corporations and government agencies improve their cyber resilience.
