Improve Your Disaster Recovery Planning
How to build an accurate IT asset inventory
Modern IT environments are complex, with many dependencies. This causes significant challenges—and costs—when organizations need to recover from data breaches or IT outages.
More than 75% of organizations need 100 days or more to recover from a data breach, and 95% of professionals say they experience challenges in fully understanding their organization’s IT assets.
An accurate IT asset inventory is essential for business continuity & disaster recovery, managing risk, complying with regulations, and enabling digital transformation initiatives. But what’s the best approach to building one?
Our white paper explains what an accurate IT asset inventory looks like, why it’s important, why it’s hard to create, and the strengths and weaknesses of technologies used in modern solutions. Here’s a quick preview:
What does accurate mean for an asset inventory?
Many organizations struggle to simply compile a list of the computers they own. However, an accurate asset inventory is not just about having a list of what you own—it’s about understanding every component that contributes to your business operations.
Why is an accurate asset inventory so important?
For disaster recovery, you need to have strategies to bring assets back online in the case of a failure or ransomware attack. For cybersecurity, you need to understand your attack vectors. But you can’t do either if you don’t understand your environment. A simple list of assets isn’t enough—you need to understand which ones are most critical to your business, and what their dependencies are. New operational resilience regulations are starting to mandate this.
The current state of asset inventories is poor
Most large enterprises are missing a significant portion of assets from their inventories—generally at least 20%. This isn’t a small oversight—it’s a serious vulnerability. Also troubling is the large gap in understanding how the infrastructure supports core business functions.
What makes asset inventories so difficult?
From cloud sprawl and shadow IT to the complexities of container infrastructure and bring your own device (BYOD) policies, the scale and complexity of modern IT environments outpace traditional methods of asset tracking.
Technologies used to build an asset inventory
The most common approaches are using scanners, connectors, or sensors. Each has its pros and cons.
Want to dive into the details? Fill out the form to get the white paper.
