Building an Accurate IT Asset Inventory: A Foundation for Cyber Resilience
A version of this article was previously published in Automation Magazine
Modern businesses rely on an increasingly complex array of interconnected IT, OT (Operational Technology), and IoT (Internet of Things) assets. This is particularly true in manufacturing, but also in any organization with a physical presence, where technology can include security cameras, building access controls, HVAC systems, and more. These assets span multiple environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, virtualized, and containers. For simplicity, I’ll refer to all this technology as “IT.”
Amid this complexity, creating and maintaining an accurate IT asset inventory can be challenging, but it is a critical component of cyber resilience. Cyber resilience is the bridge between operational resilience and cybersecurity; it aims to ensure that businesses can protect their most critical assets and quickly restore operations in the face of outages or cyberattacks—a growing inevitability in today’s threat landscape.
This article explores the importance of accurate IT asset inventories, the challenges organizations face, and the steps needed to build and maintain one effectively.
Why an Accurate IT Asset Inventory Matters
An accurate IT asset inventory underpins cyber resilience, enabling organizations to:
See Everything Across All Environments: Without visibility into all assets, organizations cannot effectively protect or restore critical operations. Regulations like the European Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation are beginning to mandate this visibility.
Map IT Complexity to Business Activity: Cyber resilience requires not only identifying assets but understanding how they support key business functions. Standards and frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO/IEC 27001, and CIS Controls emphasize this connection as foundational for enterprise-wide IT, cybersecurity, and risk management.
Prioritize Risk Management and Recovery Efforts: Knowing what assets are critical to your business helps prioritize cybersecurity measures and backup and recovery efforts, ensuring faster restoration of essential operations.
Defining Accuracy in IT Asset Inventories
An “accurate” IT asset inventory goes beyond listing devices and systems. It should:
Include All Connected Assets and Devices: This includes traditional IT assets like servers, databases, and network infrastructure; OT and IoT devices; shadow IT (unauthorized systems) and middleware (shared infrastructure, often used for passing messages between systems). Make sure to also include external, third-party systems your business depends on.
Capture Dependency Information: Understanding how assets interconnect and depend on each other is crucial for prioritizing risks and planning business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR).
Be Continuously Updated: IT environments are dynamic, with regular turnover in assets. Outdated inventories quickly lose their utility.
Unfortunately, most organizations have poor asset inventories. Research shows that businesses know only about 80% of their assets – and only 30% of the assets critical to any given business function. This incomplete visibility creates significant blind spots, particularly among high-risk assets such as single points of failure or systems unmanaged by security teams.
Overcoming Challenges to Build an Accurate Inventory
Several challenges hinder organizations in their efforts to maintain accurate IT asset inventories, including:
Scale and Complexity: Modern IT estates span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, often involving dynamic assets like containers. Most asset inventory tools struggle to handle the complete picture.
Shadow IT and BYOD: Business units often deploy unauthorized systems, and employees’ use of personal devices (Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD) further complicates inventory efforts.
Resource Constraints: IT staff often lack the time or tools to manually update inventories.
Ineffective Tools: Solutions that rely solely on scanning or on integrating existing data sources fail to capture the full picture, particularly in dynamic or cloud-based environments. Most tools focus on compiling lists of known assets from many sources, when the real challenge is addressing the issue that awareness of assets correlates with organizational control over them, and business context is lacking.
Steps to Ensure Accuracy
Building and maintaining an accurate IT asset inventory requires a shift from manual, static processes to automated, dynamic approaches. Here are some tips:
Focus on Risk Management, Not Just Asset Counting: The goal is not to track every device but to manage risks by fully understanding the organization’s attack surface. Prioritize assets that communicate or contribute to business-critical operations.
Invest in Asset Discovery Capabilities: Sensors deployed for passive network monitoring can collect communication data, helping to identify all connected assets and their interactions. This provides a more accurate view than approaches that merely aggregate data from other systems.
Understand Dependencies: Mapping dependencies between assets is essential for assessing risks and planning BCDR. Understanding which systems support key business functions enables prioritization of cybersecurity and recovery efforts.
Adopt Tools That Handle Modern Environments: Ensure your inventory solution can handle dynamic environments like containers and microservices, as well as hybrid setups that include cloud services. Tools must go beyond tracking IP addresses to understand asset functions and interdependencies.
Automate Inventory Updates: Automation is critical for keeping up with the rapid pace of change in IT environments. Manual processes cannot keep up with the typical 5-15% monthly turnover in assets, let alone the increased use of cloud and container technologies.
Use Data-Driven Automation to Map Assets to Business Functions: The real value of an IT asset inventory lies in understanding how infrastructure supports the business. For example, knowing that a particular server supports an e-commerce platform’s payment processing function helps prioritize its protection and recovery.
Cyber resilience bridges the gap between operational resilience and cybersecurity
Unlocking the Benefits of an Accurate Inventory
An accurate IT asset inventory provides more than just visibility—it enables actionable insights that enhance cyber resilience. By mapping assets to business functions, organizations can:
Identify High-Priority Risks: Focus cybersecurity resources on the assets that pose the greatest risk to operations.
Accelerate Incident Response and Recovery: Quickly restore critical operations by understanding dependencies and prioritizing the right systems.
Ensure Compliance: Meet regulatory requirements and adhere to global standards by demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of your IT environment.
Optimize Resource Allocation: Avoid wasting resources on low-risk assets while ensuring adequate protection for high-risk ones.
Conclusion
In today’s interconnected and dynamic IT landscape, maintaining an accurate IT asset inventory is both a challenge and a necessity. It forms the foundation for effective cyber resilience, enabling organizations to protect critical operations and quickly recover from disruptions.
By adopting automated, dynamic approaches and focusing on risk management, businesses can overcome the challenges of scale, complexity, and shadow IT to achieve a complete and continuously updated view of their IT environment. With this foundation in place, organizations are better equipped to face the ever-evolving threat landscape and ensure their long-term success.
