Cyber asset management can become a full time job in dynamic and large environments. In OT environments, it becomes specially important before of during expansions and upgrades. One vital piece is the Asset Inventory, which plays as a step in cyber assets' security as well.
Before you can protect your assets, you have to know what they are, where they are located, and who's responsible for them.
This article covers the preliminary questions you should ask before developing a long-term strategy. Your answers will help you understand how you can benefit from automated tools that help keep track of all your business assets.
Identifying and Classifying Your Assets
You can get started by asking yourself:
What assets do we own?
What is the value of the asset?
How critical they are for our operations?
When was the asset purchased or built?
What is the expected lifecycle of the asset?
Who is responsible for the assets?
Tracking and Locating Your Assets
Once you find a way and make the effort to answer the first set of questions, you next challenge would be answering the following:
Are the assets currently tagged and labeled?
Is the current registry up to date?
Who owns the asset location and management process?
How often are we conducting asset audits?
Are there missing assets or record discrepancies?
Do we have leased or rented assets?
Have there been changes in asset location or ownership?
The Big Picture
While the concept of implementing and maintaining an asset inventory may appear simple, having a well-organized and consistently updated asset inventory is vital to the foundation of a successful cybersecurity program, and it can be time and resource intensive. Many existing asset inventories and asset management solutions are cluttered with excessive and irrelevant information, creating confusion rather than clarity, so we should always remember that more is not always better.
At Novaigu, we've addressed this challenge by designing our platform to eliminate the unnecessary noise. We focus on what truly matters, streamlining the process to ensure that you have access to the essential information without distraction. By prioritizing the most relevant data, our platform empowers teams to build a more robust and efficient cybersecurity strategy.