How Dependency Analysis Improves Cybersecurity Asset Management
Cybersecurity asset management (CSAM) is the practice of identifying, categorizing, and maintaining a real-time inventory of a company’s digital assets. It involves tracking and managing a wide range of assets, such as hardware, software, data, and network components. This inventory is used to enhance security, compliance, and operational efficiency by helping organizations mitigate security risks and ensure regulatory compliance. By creating an inventory of assets, organizations can proactively monitor high-impact vulnerabilities, prioritize patches, and implement security measures.
An asset inventory is just the first building block of an effective cybersecurity asset management solution. For a more comprehensive cybersecurity, your CSAM solution needs to be able to allow you to see and understand the connection and dependencies between assets so that you can understand how vulnerabilities or weaknesses in one area may affect the security of connected assets, and by extension, the overall security of your entire environment. CSAM needs to have dependency analysis integrated as part of the overall solution.
Dependency analysis refers to the process of identifying and assessing the relationships and interdependencies between critical business functions, components, systems, and assets within an organization's environment. It plays a crucial role in threat modeling, risk assessment, and the development of effective security strategies.
The 3 Key Components of Effective Dependency Analysis
Dependency analysis is most effective when viewed in the wider context of how your organization works. Identifying your critical business functions and identifying the assets connected to those functions gives you valuable context in which to evaluate the dependencies between your assets and focus your efforts on those areas that will provide the best value for your time and resources.
Identify Critical Business Functions
Critical business functions (CBFs) are the core activities that keep an organization running smoothly and generate revenue. Identifying CBFs helps your organization allocate resources effectively.
Identify Assets Connected to CBFs
Every critical business function relies on a set of assets to provide that service to the organization, including endpoints, servers, cloud software, and more. Knowing which assets are necessary to provide critical functions helps your organization allocate resources effectively and understand critical dependencies.
Identify Dependencies Between Assets
Identify the relationships between hardware, software, data, networks, and users. This includes understanding how different components interact and rely on each other to perform their functions.
Benefits of Dependency Analysis
Once you’ve performed a comprehensive analysis, these are the ways that the information you’ve gathered can be used to improve various aspects of your cybersecurity posture.
Enable Cloud Migration
Understanding the dependencies that exist between your assets and how they connect to critical business functions provides your organization with the necessary insights, risk assessment, and control needed to protect assets during and after the migration process. This helps you minimize security risks and enhance your overall cloud environment’s cybersecurity posture.
Assist with CMDB Validation
Cybersecurity asset management is a valuable ally in the CMDB validation process. It helps maintain the accuracy and completeness of CMDB data by continuously discovering, monitoring, identifying, and validating IT assets within an organization. CMDB validation is essential for maintaining the accuracy and reliability of the CMDB, which in turn supports efficient IT service management, risk mitigation, incident resolution, compliance, and overall IT asset and resource management.
Enhanced Vulnerability Assessment
Once dependencies are identified, security professionals can assess the vulnerabilities within these dependencies. Weaknesses or misconfigurations in one component may create a potential entry point for attackers to exploit.
Upgraded Impact Analysis
Understanding the dependencies makes it possible to assess the potential impact of a security breach or failure in one component on the rest of the system. This helps in prioritizing security measures and incident response plans.
Improved Risk Mitigation
Dependency analysis informs risk management strategies. It aids in the allocation of resources to address high-risk dependencies and helps organizations prioritize security patches, updates, or configuration changes.
Accurate Resilience Planning
Knowing your CBFs and their associated dependencies is crucial for continuity and disaster recovery planning. It allows organizations to develop strategies for maintaining critical functions in the event of a cyberattack or system failure.
Meet Compliance & Regulatory Requirements
Many cybersecurity regulations and standards, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), require organizations to demonstrate that they have identified and mitigated risks through dependency analysis.
More Effective Monitoring & Detection
Dependency analysis can also inform the design of intrusion detection and monitoring systems, helping organizations detect suspicious activities that might indicate a compromise.
In summary, dependency analysis is a fundamental aspect of cybersecurity and IT management that helps companies understand the relationships and vulnerabilities within their environment. It serves as a basis for informed decision-making, risk management, and the development of effective security measures to protect against cyber threats.
The Redjack Approach
The Redjack platform includes an AI engine that analyzes the communications between the assets in your network in order to give you a comprehensive view of your connected infrastructure. Beyond that, the Redjack solution automatically identifies which assets are connected to critical business functions and the interdependencies between assets.
This massively scalable solution arms you with the information you need to develop a data-centric strategy to improve the efficiency of your cybersecurity, enhancing cyber resilience and strategic planning.
Contact us to learn how Redjack has been helping the CIOs and CISOs of the world's largest corporations and government agencies manage their cyber risk.
