Last Updated on 7 June 2023 by admin
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Digital assets are the most valuable part of businesses, containing important sensitive data and financial information. Most organizations have an external asset inventory, but it can be time-consuming, extensive, and difficult to manage effectively. With the increasing use of cloud infrastructure, tracking internet-facing assets has become more of a challenge – making it near impossible to keep your asset inventory up to date. As a result, the expanding attack surface offers more opportunities for a threat actor to pose an attack on your systems and network infrastructure.
Asset inventory refers to the manner in which an organization catalogs and audits assets and their associated data. In this case, we are discussing intangible assets, which are harder to log and track. Having a robust way of monitoring your inventory is crucial to not only your accounting processes but also to achieving sound cyber security.
7 benefits of automated external asset inventory management
Below we outline some of the core benefits of saying goodbye to laborious manual inventory management and harnessing automated security scanning for more tractable security monitoring.
Improve operational efficiency with efficient asset tracking
Automation drastically speeds up the asset discovery process by continuously scanning for known and unknown assets. Without having to manually locate and record all of your assets, you can focus on analyzing and systemizing them instead – saving precious time and boosting productivity.
Asset management and inventory in one place
Continuous cyber security monitoring, like attack surface management, uses automation for active asset discovery, tracking, and auditing. As a form of passive inventory management, you can easily monitor your assets in a single repository. Informer’s attack surface management platform does just that; informing you of which assets belong to you, where they are located, and how to remediate any associated vulnerabilities that could leave you susceptible to a cyber-attack or data breach.
Access real-time asset insights
Dynamic asset mapping reveals all of your life assets and provides a real-time view of your IT environment, identifies online changes you might not be aware of, and provides you with a birds-eye view of your evolving external perimeter.
Harness a scalable tracking solution
As a business’s digital footprint increases, so must its security – this will help guarantee that capacity problems don’t hinder responses to security incidents. Automated asset discovery is a strategy that can increase or decrease in capacity to support a larger or smaller load, subject to variations in demand. In other words, it readily safeguards your systems even if your load changes.
It’s also important to note the bigger your business, the more assets you’ll have to manage and thus the larger your attack surface. So, a solution like this is invaluable in light of today’s threat climate.
Remain compliant with data protection regulations
With more stringent security laws and requirements, and an increase in the storage and transmission of sensitive data, conforming to mandated data security policy demands is vital. In fact, it’s fast becoming a legal requirement to have a security platform connected to your assets. To name a few: the General Data Protection Regulation, the New York SHIELD Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Knowing exactly which assets belong to you is crucial and helps reduce your risk of breaching these regulations.
Informer’s external asset discovery engine is being improved to signal potential data protection issues – assets with personal information received by websites outside of the EU are pinpointed as a potential compliance issue within the platform.
Make more informed security decisions
You can’t remediate risks that you aren’t aware of, and security strategies become meaningless if they aren’t risk-based. Implementing a continuous security monitoring process that locates and records your assets while flagging security concerns will empower you to make accurate cyber security decisions, with granular insights in a single database.
Reduce your cyber risk
Manually managing a constantly changing asset inventory is an ambitious task. Knowledge of potential attack vectors, as well as your organization’s specific weak points, is key to achieving and maintaining a robust security posture and protecting your organization’s reputation.
Avoid a cyber attack and make your life easier!
In such a fast-evolving digital climate, staying on top of fast-changing assets can seem more of an ideal than a reality. But with a solution like Informer, you can rest assured knowing your inventory is taken care of.
Want to learn more about how you can avoid a cyber attack, protect your business, and make your life easier? Book a demo with our friendly team.
