The most obvious way to protect your assets is to have a team of people who are constantly identifying the IT Assets, threats, updating the threat intelligence, implementing protection mechanisms and so on. This is an enormous amount of work but not necessarily an effective strategy. Instead, it seems more likely that much better results will be achieved by focusing on the known threats and then taking preventative action against them – for example, through network security and application hardening. You should also be aware that, potentially at least, the organization is under attack from a wide scope of dangers that are adjusting and advancing nearly as fast as they’re recognized. It’s an overwhelming challenge to secure the assets you think about, against these assaults, however the straightforward truth is that you can’t protect assets that you’re not even mindful of.
The Battle against Unknown and Unseen:
In today’s environment, there is a constant battle against unknown and unseen. Organizations have a critical need to know what’s going on inside their IT infrastructure – or at least have a minimum level of visibility – but it’s not always feasible to have complete visibility into everything that’s going on. In fact, for many organizations, reaching 100% visibility is an impossibility. The biggest challenge organizations face is managing the unmanageable.
The problem is that by not seeing all the systems and environments you have in place, you are missing an opportunity to manage your environment and therefore expose yourself to risk proactively. You may also end up paying for unnecessary services or security controls that aren’t necessary if you have the right visibility into your environment. Managing IT Assets through excel sheets doesn’t help in the new era.
The result is that employees can introduce devices or apps that could put company data at risk. This is especially true for mobile devices, which are increasingly used for mobile access to the network and as a means of storing sensitive data. With this new capability, employees can introduce unknowns into the enterprise with little or no warning, and IT managers have little or no ability to prevent it.
In a traditional company, IT is the only department authorized to have access to the corporate network. A new device or app cannot be introduced to the network without IT’s knowledge or consent by employees or suppliers. For example, a supplier may introduce a new device into the corporate network without IT’s knowledge or consent.
But the only way to fully understand what the IT devices are, the software and third-party services they run on and how they can be accessed is through a deep understanding of the IT Assets on the network. Using an IT asset discovery tool like that of Digitowork’s will help you to understand that IT Assets data is a necessary foundation to any program designed to maintain, manage and secure IT infrastructure.
How to Identify and Secure IT Assets: Know Who, What, and Where in Your Network Infrastructure
In order to make sense of this, Digitowork offers a comprehensive set of IT Asset management solutions and a robust execution framework. In addition to IT Asset Management solutions, Digitowork also provides industry-leading visibility for monitoring and troubleshooting of servers. Digitowork is an integral part of the IT Asset Management program for many global customers, and are proud to be provided the solution that supported global IT Asset discovery & compliance program.
The most basic truth in computer and network security is the ability to determine what devices are on your network and which ones are critical and which ones are not. Depending on your industry, you should know whether every device on your network should be considered critical or not. For example, if you are working with information, you should always think about whether every device on the network should be considered important or not. It would be best to determine whether every device within your organization can be considered critical or not. Suppose someone has infiltrated into your company’s internal network; in that case, they can use an unguarded device as a tool to find other ways into other parts of your company’s internal systems where sensitive data could be found even though it might have been encrypted by using strong encryption algorithms built into your encryption software. Even if there has been no penetration of your company’s internal networks, data sent by email over insecure channels could still contain malicious software that could still lead to an attacker gaining access into other systems within your company through exploiting vulnerabilities in those systems.
The Unknown Threat
In a short time, the security landscape has changed dramatically. It is not uncommon to hear about new IT devices or services that are unknown. It has become all too easy in today’s connected world for an attacker to identify and exploit unknown vulnerabilities before organizations can identify and patch them. While identifying these assets may be straightforward in some cases, in others, it may be much more challenging. Different techniques are used to discover different types of IT devices as all devices are not the same.
A common solution to this challenge is to use automated IT Asset discovery & reconciliation tools that find unknown assets within the network. These tools are typically designed to detect known threats, but for an unknown IT asset, there are almost always additional questions that need to be answered.
In an IT environment, trust relationships are as important as vulnerabilities. In order to ascertain the overall risk level of a trust flow, it is important to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of the IT assets. The issue of trust is particularly significant in the context of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) deployments. Using a device that has been compromised can have catastrophic consequences for the organization. Therefore, it is critical to assess how IT devices are used before acceptance at your organization and how these devices are monitored, maintained and controlled.
In some cases, a lack of visibility makes it difficult to assess the risk from an IT asset. For example, you may have direct access to the asset but have no insight into its network connectivity or functionality. In other cases, you may know the asset but cannot determine the impact of an attack on that asset. The value of a compromised asset cannot be evaluated without knowing more details about the device and how it is connected to other devices. Therefore, it is important to understand the context in which an IT asset operates and assess the threat to ensure appropriate protection can be applied based on actual risk levels and threat profiles.
Solving the Shadow IT Problem
We have introduced ‘Shadow IT’ to describe IT assets that are not IT-owned or managed by your organization. The challenge arises when these shadow IT assets are connected to the network without being included in your IT Asset Management System (ITAM) or are unknown to your IT Discovery tools. Digitowork offers comprehensive IT Asset Management solutions to identify unknown IT assets in your environment. Digitowork has expertise and innovative processes to assist you with constantly discovering unknown assets so you can ensure they are properly secured and no longer pose a threat.
Digitowork is a specialised ITAM firm that has discovered & protected systems for the global organizations. It provides clients with superior IT asset identification solutions that accurately account for all IT assets, including those hidden within shadow IT resources. Digitowork provides you with real-time visibility of your entire IT asset environment, including your shadow IT resources. This information is used to automatically build an inventory of your entire IT environment, including both physical and software assets. From there, it can be used to help you manage risk, strengthen compliance programs, improve financial reporting metrics, support infrastructure, operations and optimize your overall IT security posture.
Final Words
We live in a connected world, and organizations are quickly recognizing the real-world implications of such connectedness. The term “IT Asset Management” has recently come into relevance when talking about IT assets security in organizations around the globe. ITAM has been called many things over the years, but we like to refer to it as the ability (and proven capability) to protect sensitive IT assets and information in non-permissive environments.
Identifying newly connected assets is not a trivial task, as each new device or service that gets connected to a network may have different characteristics and capabilities. Moreover, the proliferation of IoT has increased the number of devices that may need to be explicitly identified, categorized, and subsequently secured. In most cases, organizations do not know exactly what devices and services exist within their environment. The number of possible combinations of devices that could be used to deliver information or services is enormous, especially in large environments. IT Asset Discovery and Software Assessment solution is the only way for organizations to keep a .complete control on IT devices. It provides total visibility of all known and unknown assets on a network. Devices not only need to be identified but also assessed for their security posture.
