Strategy and risk management with CSAM
Table of Contents
- What is cybersecurity asset management?
- What happens when you don’t prioritize cybersecurity asset management?
- Why is cybersecurity asset management important?
- What constitutes cybersecurity asset management?
- Taking control of your cybersecurity asset management
- 4. Create a more secure environment
- Virima makes it easier to manage risks
Cybersecurity risk management is an ongoing process that requires organizations to assess their risks and implement mitigating controls to reduce those risks.
Risk assessment requires taking a look at an organization’s network and data assets in light of the current business environment and any regulatory requirements. The results of this analysis determine what types of controls should be put in place, based on the existing assets, vulnerabilities, threats and attack techniques caused by them.
The principles of cybersecurity asset management can help organizations identify, assess, and manage their assets. The process of properly identifying your assets is an essential step in ensuring that your organization remains secure. This article will discuss what cybersecurity asset management is and how it can help protect your company from cyber attacks.
What is cybersecurity asset management?
Cybersecurity asset management (CSAM) is the process of identifying, classifying and managing information technology assets. CSAM is a subset of IT asset management, which itself is a subset of cybersecurity.
CSAM can be thought of as part of an organization’s overall risk management strategy or simply as a component within IT strategy.
The purpose of cybersecurity asset management is to provide an organized, systematic approach for managing the lifecycle of IT assets. The overall objective of CSAM is to keep track of all the devices and software within an organization in order to facilitate identification and remediation of vulnerabilities, better manage IT assets and staff, and improve security posture over time.
Read: Service mapping for risk assessment and analysis
What happens when you don’t prioritize cybersecurity asset management?
Currently, the biggest risk is that organizations are not aware of what the risks are or that they are lacking any type of cybersecurity asset management strategy or process. Without knowing where their assets reside, how they are connected, who has access to them and what permission levels those users have within their systems, security teams are handicapped.
Risks associated with poor cybersecurity asset management can manifest themselves in many ways. For example, if a breach makes essential data or systems unavailable, the business may not function. Not only will such disruptions harm the business’s reputation, but they also have serious financial consequences (e.g., fines and penalties).
Another example is when malware from the workplace network infects an employee’s personal device, which is then used at home on vacation. This infection could lead to personal identity theft, which can also result in fines and penalties for the company (the employer)
Poor cybersecurity asset management isn’t just a nuisance. It can also make your organization unsafe. Without a clear listing of servers and devices, you may not know where the most serious risks lie or the specific devices that need the most protection. This leaves you guessing about what security resources to deploy and where when an issue arises. Without choosing wisely, you could be wasting your money and leaving your business open to attack.
Why is cybersecurity asset management important?
Cybersecurity asset management is a crucial part of your IT strategy. Understanding your assets and how they are being used is important. It allows you to assess their value and prioritize risk mitigation efforts.
It starts with a clear understanding of what you have—the technology that makes up your organization’s digital footprint. This includes things like hardware, software, applications and data. From there, cybersecurity asset management allows you to identify risks specific to those assets, which will help determine where security investments should be made in order to protect them from attacks or other unwanted activity.
This type of assessment also provides insights into how best to protect the assets themselves: For example: What kind of hardware do we need? How do we secure our data against theft or destruction? What sort of protective measures should be taken when storing sensitive information? And so on.
What constitutes cybersecurity asset management?
Cybersecurity asset management is the process by which you make sure that the security risks of your business are properly managed. It requires a variety of activities involving a number of different IT resources and personnel. The specifics of cybersecurity asset management will vary from one business to another, but there are some common characteristics and steps that all businesses can benefit from.
1. Discovery and protection of devices
The key to safeguarding your cybersecurity is proactive asset management.
Identifying the devices on your network is essential to protecting your systems. For example, take an inventory of the devices on your network and assess each one for security vulnerabilities. Secure endpoints if needed with segmentation, quarantine or firewalls to prevent unauthorized access.
2. Cloud security
Cloud security refers to the protection of cloud services, applications, data and users from malicious threats. Cybersecurity asset management identifies all cloud-based services that are vulnerable to attack due to insecure software or lack of access control.
Cloud vendors offer tools, such as virtual machine security assessments, for cybersecurity asset management.
3. Incident response
Cybersecurity asset management is a critical function for threat detection. By collecting and analyzing data from across the enterprise, data can be used to identify threats, lower the severity of the threats, and respond quickly when incidents occur.
Incident response (IR) teams use this information to quickly identify potential attacks, assess their impact, and quarantine all suspicious activity before it has any impact on the company or its customers.
4. Vulnerability management
Vulnerability management keeps your organization safe by helping detect, track and address active vulnerabilities, such as unpatched software running on a device. A core part of any cybersecurity strategy, vulnerability management helps ensure that the right personnel are notified in a timely manner so that they can work to mitigate any potential attack.
5. Continuous policy enforcement
If devices matching an active policy profile are added to the network, they will automatically be protected.
Thus, it is impossible for most breaches to occur. You will gain visibility into every resource in your organization regardless of how it is configured over time and understand how policies were applied and enforced throughout their life cycles.
Read: How to prevent data breaches with asset discovery?
Taking control of your cybersecurity asset management
Often, it is necessary for an organization to understand the importance of managing its assets. This is because there are many different types of risks that can befall an organization if they do not properly identify and manage their cybersecurity risks. In order to avoid these dangers, it is important that a company’s cybersecurity risk management strategy includes asset management capabilities.
Cybersecurity asset management is a proactive strategy that can help you:
1. Improve security posture
Cybersecurity risk management is grounded in the concept of asset and threat management. The first step is creating an inventory of your organization’s critical information systems and mapping all the systems that are essential to your organization’s operations.
By compiling this initial list, you should also be able to identify gaps where you may need to supplement automation with human resources.
Once completed, review the list and prioritize based on risk assessment; this will ensure that you’re taking care of the most pressing security concerns while reducing risk exposure in other areas.
2. Reduce the risk of a breach
Actively manage the risk of a breach. Keep up with cybersecurity trends, technologies, and threats to identify actionable risks and implement mitigation strategies. Implement preventative measures, use continuous monitoring to detect potential threats, and respond promptly with appropriate action when an incident does occur.
3. Improve business continuity and disaster recovery
The cybersecurity asset management framework is a risk-based approach to managing cybersecurity assets, their data and their information.
It includes a comprehensive risk assessment that includes: the risks to your business continuity and disaster recovery, key controls assessment, an asset inventory including the technological and operational components, data classification and mapping of cybersecurity controls to specific assets to determine where gaps exist, and verification of controls being rigorously tested and measured for effectiveness
4. Create a more secure environment
Cybersecurity asset management can help businesses identify, assess and address the security risks posed by devices, assets and apps that are connected to their networks. These risks can range from simple phishing attacks to advanced persistent threats (APTs) deployed by nation-state actors or organized crime groups.
It is important to manage risk proactively by continuously monitoring the enterprise network and data environment with real-time visibility.
Virima makes it easier to manage risks
Cybersecurity asset management is a critical component of any cybersecurity strategy. It can help you better understand your organization’s assets and vulnerabilities, as well as how they can be protected and managed. This knowledge will help you take steps toward a more secure future – but first, it’s important to know where your organization stands when it comes to cybersecurity risk management.
Virima tracks your cloud-based assets as easily as if they were on-premise, and provides easy integration with cloud provider management consoles, so that your virtual assets like AWS EC2 Instances and Azure Virtual Machines are listed alongside other CMDB assets. Additionally, Virima can run within the cloud environment for application discovery and dependency mapping. Now you can fully manage your cloud applications, identify dependencies to on-premise resources, and tie everything back to the business services these applications support.
Virima allows you to see all cloud-based assets, and tie incidents and problems back to those assets as needed. It also supports requests for new instances, which can be tracked by service level requirements and other business needs. Finally, Virima allows you to properly handle changes and updates to cloud-based infrastructure, so that your organization can stay compliant with internal security regulations or even external standardsKnow more about cybersecurity asset management, discovery, service mapping, and more from the experts at Virima by scheduling a demo.
