When you as an organization assess your security controls and map your security characteristics to guidance and best practices, an important factor to think about is how to quickly identify anomalous behavior before it snowballs into something big.
What are the possible gaps that you need to identify and address?
It all starts with what’s on your network!!
Industry frameworks like NIST or CIS, heavily emphasize on identifying what’s on your network and asset management, including current inventory of an organization’s enterprise and software assets. The foundational key to an effective cybersecurity strategy is to make IT asset management a priority. Most of the organizations, IT teams and cybersecurity teams, struggle to get an understanding of what is on their network (assets), what is on it (what type of data, access, and its criticality), who has it (the owner and users), and where it is located (geographically and logically). With increased use of multi-cloud environments (in addition to on-premises), and often having two or three cloud providers, telemetry and visibility becomes even more critical.
The modern hybrid architecture has increased the attack surface, and to be able to reduce the risk of users being compromised, start identifying physical and virtual assets and what they are doing. Having the ability to automatically capture details of every device that has connected to the network when it asks for an IP address via DHCP provides great insight into what type of device it is, and what OS it is running. Together with IPAM (IP Address Management) data, you can also know who the user is that is logged on (via AD integration) and which access point or switch port did the device connect to. IT and security teams benefit by identifying assets, tracking and updating it’s network location whenever there are changes. Organizations can automate and have a single source of asset information using the IP Address Management (IPAM) Database.
An IPAM database collectively improves the whole asset management and Incident response process. Having visibility into assets connected virtually and physically can assist the IT and security teams to easily lookup asset information related to a security alert within the IPAM database, and quickly identify the compromised device, with the help of user and network location. Another way to have an efficient asset management capability is to streamline security monitoring, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management capabilities with the IPAM database and other existing asset discovery capabilities. By integrating asset management system(s) to the organization’s security ecosystem (SIEM/SOAR, vulnerability management, ITSM) security teams can automate their response to new and/or compromised assets in the environment resulting in reduced Incident response time by 2/3rds.
Prioritizing asset management security capability reduces the unknown risks or uncertainty relating to rogue devices/virtual machines and provides a significant return on investment in cybersecurity investigation. With the explosive growth of SaaS and cloud solutions, having centralized visibility of IP infrastructure streamlines workflows, reduces issues caused by unauthorized changes, automates discovery of assets, and improves reporting for IT and security teams.
