Quarterly vulnerability assessments are a common practice among organizations to validate their security posture and support compliance requirements. Organizations schedule vulnerability scans for their enterprises, including IoT, Operational Technology (OT) and any other device or system that poses a risk. Typically, you would see them running these assessments internally using their own security team, or hiring a third-party to perform these assessments for them.
The third-party providers would discuss the Scope of Work to gather as much information about the client’s network, subnets, and their IT and OT environment to make sure they are covering all their critical applications and infrastructure. At the same time, they need to ensure that when they perform the assessment, testing would not disrupt any essential production processes for the client, which could possibly result in loss of service, slowing the production environment, etc.
As a Cyber Security Consultant, when I performed enterprise-wide vulnerability assessments, what I found was that the standard practice for most of the organizations was to manually track and manage IP addresses, and gain network insight of assets that are connected to their network.
Most of the customers and prospects we meet with suffer from limited asset information and depend heavily on Excel Spreadsheets, which only includes IP addresses and the physical location of the assets. It’s highly likely that the Spreadsheet content is not kept up-to-date and decommissioned systems remain, while newly provisioned ones may be missing. The risk to the organization is greatly increased due to the unreliable scope of identified assets, which would lead to vulnerability oversights and missing security patches. The resulting control gaps would expose the organization to malicious attacks by threat actors in their efforts to compromise critical systems and create business disruption.
Having to manually update spreadsheets with rapidly evolving network infrastructure is not the best practice in obtaining real-time visibility of your network assets and their location in the network. Without an IP Address Management (IPAM) solution in place, network administrators miss out on having an accurate list of devices that are connected to their on-premises or hybrid cloud platforms.
Here’s where Infoblox can help. Organizations can get greater insight and control of their network using Infoblox’s IPAM QuickStart, which provides automated visibility and accuracy to centrally manage your network data, hosts, servers, and dynamic clients. This leads to reliable discovery and control of on-premises or hybrid cloud networks.
With Infoblox’s IPAM and DHCP solution, network and security teams can have an increase in network agility, efficiency, and responsiveness, which could lower the number of findings during a vulnerability assessment, detect security risks and quarantine rogue devices automatically.
Having it all in a centralized platform unlocks network insight from shared data to simplify asset management and makes it easier to anticipate IP address capacity and take advantage of predictive analysis to avoid address exhaustion and prevent outages.
Using an IPAM tool and leveraging it to control your network helps network administrators to overcome visibility challenges and have a near-real time, up-to-date consolidated view of their network. It also helps the security team be aware of possible rogue and unmanaged devices, and potentially compromised assets which are already registered in the network. Hence, having it all visible and registered in a centralized platform helps to manage assets, fix possible vulnerabilities discovered in regular vulnerability assessments, and practice proper security compliance enforcement.
