Why Is Creating an Asset Inventory Critical for Your Cybersecurity Posture?

Updated: July 30, 2024

Originally Published: October 31, 2023

An asset inventory is the central foundation of your cybersecurity program. It provides you with comprehensive visibility into your connected infrastructure. An asset inventory covers all assets, whether in the cloud, containers, or on-premises. Such an inventory allows you to optimize your cybersecurity planning and prioritize your efforts on your most important, business-critical functions. It also gives you the context you need to understand interdependencies between critical assets. An inventory can be used to locate weak points in your organization’s cybersecurity posture, such as shadow IT utilization or clusters of insecure systems connected to a critical business function. 

Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date asset inventory supports your cybersecurity posture in several ways including:

Continuous asset visibility

You need to know what assets you have so that you can secure them. Without an accurate inventory, your organization may overlook critical components, making it easier for attackers to exploit unnoticed vulnerabilities or third-party connections. However, organizations generally aren’t designed, they grow organically as your IT staff adds capabilities as needed. Enterprise environments change drastically month by month, generally between 5% and 15%, as new assets are integrated into the infrastructure and old assets are phased out. An inventory provides ongoing visibility into your organization's technology landscape. It continuously monitors your infrastructure for changes to ensure that decision-makers have access to the most up-to-date information, facilitating informed and timely decision-making.

Alignment with business objectives

A modern asset inventory has moved beyond merely being a static list of your assets. It goes beyond assigning those assets to the critical business functions that they support. It encourages a shift from IT-centric thinking to a more business-focused perspective, allowing executives to focus on business functions like "logistics and shipping" rather than generic IT groupings like "Windows servers." For cybersecurity leaders, this approach ensures that cybersecurity planning is aligned closely with the organization's overarching business objectives and priorities.

Prioritized risk assessment

Cybersecurity risk management involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential security threats and vulnerabilities within your digital environment. It involves understanding the value of digital assets, evaluating the likelihood and impact of various threats, and implementing measures to reduce risks to an acceptable level. Because of this, an asset inventory plays a critical role in improving risk management. Total visibility gives you a complete picture of your infrastructure while understanding which assets your organization’s critical business functions rely on to operate is a vital part of assessing your overall cybersecurity risk. Having a continuously updated asset inventory enables you to prioritize security efforts based on asset criticality, and allocate limited resources effectively.

Effective vulnerability management

An asset inventory is essential for an effective vulnerability management program. A modern asset inventory solution is capable of scoring assets by resilience and criticality, assessing the importance of assets and understanding the potential business impact in case of downtime. Knowing this allows you to prioritize which vulnerabilities are more urgent, helping you allocate scarce resources effectively and maximize the impact of your efforts on the overall security posture of your organization.

Incident response visibility

In the event of a cybersecurity incident, having an accurate asset inventory is crucial for a swift and effective response. Incident response teams need to know what systems and data are affected in order to contain and remediate the incident promptly. Additionally, knowing which systems are connected to and communicate with affected systems is also critical, as attackers can use these paths for lateral movement.

Compliance and auditing

Many industry regulations and compliance standards require organizations to maintain an accurate inventory of their assets. Having an up-to-date asset inventory facilitates compliance audits and ensures that your organization can meet regulatory requirements.

Improve third-party risk management

Organizations often use third-party vendors and services. Maintaining an asset inventory helps you understand the external dependencies and potential risks associated with third-party relationships, allowing you to make better risk management decisions.

Streamline budget

Managing the cybersecurity budget poses a significant challenge for cybersecurity leaders, pushing them to streamline and optimize their spending. They can do this by leveraging the power of an accurate and comprehensive asset inventory and adopting a risk-based approach. It not only helps you optimize budget spend by prioritizing critical assets. By understanding the interdependencies between assets and focusing efforts on critical business functions, you can enhance cybersecurity measures while effectively managing budget constraints.

Revolutionize your asset inventory

An asset inventory serves as the foundation for various cybersecurity practices and controls. It enhances an organization's ability to identify, protect, detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity incidents, ultimately contributing to a more robust and resilient security posture.

The Redjack cyber resilience platform enables organizations to focus resources on their most crucial components. With ongoing monitoring and evidence-based insights, Redjack empowers organizations to identify points of failure and make strategic decisions grounded in solid evidence. Ultimately, Redjack transforms organizations from a state of uncertainty to one of resilience, equipping them to restore critical business functions seamlessly in the face of adversity, such as ransomware attacks or other disruptive incidents.

Contact us to learn how Redjack has been helping the CISOs of the world's largest corporations and government agencies improve their cyber resilience.