Asset Management is a Mess. Let’s Fix That!

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), trends like remote working, and the increase in 5G adoption are combining to cause a massive surge in connected devices. As the volume of devices increases, the onus is on organizations to retain control and visibility of their assets. However, most businesses lack the technology and tools necessary to achieve this.

Estimates from industry experts like Cisco and Gartner suggest that 25 billion to 50 billion connected devices will be in use by the end of 2021. Many organizations are now heavily reliant on connected devices to conduct their business and have a wide range of assets connected to their critical data and infrastructure.

Gaining complete visibility means organizations can see every managed and unmanaged asset with the potential to impact critical business operations. As a result, they will have greater confidence about their attack surface and faster ability to make more informed decisions, which helps ensure zero downtime.

Why Asset Visibility Matters

Organizations need to discover, identify, and understand every asset in their environments, be they IT, OT, medical, or otherwise. Having this complete visibility of all assets is crucial. The more an organization knows about its assets, the better it can understand its risk and the better prepared it is to solve real business problems.

Organizations now have a broad selection of business applications, such as agentless, continuous, and passive network traffic monitoring, to help them simplify asset classification and discovery. On top of this, businesses need to ensure they have real-time intelligence of every asset across their cloud environments, endpoints, and networks.

Having this in place helps businesses detect, prioritize, eliminate, and remediate critical threats and vulnerabilities. They need to deploy tools that provide context and insight into abnormal behavior, compromised devices, and policy violations.

Common Failures of Existing Asset Visibility Tools

As organizations deploy more connected devices, maintaining the visibility of connected devices – especially unmanaged devices – becomes more complex and affects the organization’s ability to manage risk and security. Organizations are increasingly managing IT and security stacks composed of dozens of applications, which typically don’t complement each other. However, the data these tools collect is only realized when correlated and presented in a usable manner. As a result, maintaining comprehensive visibility has become a manual, complicated, and time-consuming chore.

Every device that connects to corporate networks poses various elements that an organization’s IT team needs to account for and secure. This includes applications, patches and updates, network connectivity, the operating system, and user access. Considering the vast volume of devices now in circulation, that creates a mass of complexity. As a result, organizations end up with blind spots between assets, and IT teams can’t apply the management and security policies required to protect their critical data.

The challenge now posed to organizations is making the right information available to the right people at the right time. Only then will they be able to make the right decisions quickly enough.

Common Failures That Organizations Suffer

Computers and servers: Many businesses still struggle to gain complete visibility of all their desktops, laptops, and servers. IT teams often can’t keep track of every device deployed on their various networks. Their endpoint detection response (EDR) and vulnerability management solutions often don’t identify or secure all their devices.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD):  Laptops and desktop computers are increasingly being joined in proliferating corporate networks by mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. This presents new challenges for IT teams to secure and have visibility of every device on their networks.

Cloud challenges: As organizations increasingly move to the cloud, it makes the challenge of identifying risk and suspicious activity across cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments more complex. Businesses’ growing cloud focus creates a more complicated landscape for IT and security teams to manage, creating wider visibility gaps and new opportunities for cybercriminals to target these blind spots.

IoT devices: The IoT is resulting in new types of devices going online at a rapid pace. Indeed, Cisco insight suggests that 127 new devices are connected to the Internet every second, which presents a security nightmare for IT teams. This new mass of devices often go unmanaged, don’t have in-built security, and can’t be secured by legacy solutions. Our research portrays the size of the issue facing businesses, suggesting that 90% of IoT devices that organizations deploy will be unmanaged.

Virtual machines: Organizations continue to utilize virtual machines as they make it quick and easy to deploy increased computing power. However, development speed frequently gets prioritized over security, which leaves organizations open to cloud-based and on-premises vulnerabilities. It also adds new layers of complexity when it comes to managing and mitigating risk.

A Growing Need for Modern Visibility Solutions

Many organizations don’t know which assets they have or how many assets they have. This is often because they use outdated, ineffective tools and processes like spreadsheets or manually counting to manage their assets. Many organizations also use single-purpose, siloed tools that can’t provide the level of information required to handle device security in real-time.

Businesses, therefore, need a new approach that helps them gain comprehensive visibility of their assets at all times. As devices continue to increase in volume and are updated with new versions, connect to new applications, and access new resources, IT and security teams need a single source of truth that offers complete visibility.

Armis helps organizations identify all assets on and off their corporate networks and gain continuous information about their current posture. It helps isolate threats and quickly remediate any outstanding security issues powered by the industry’s most extensive device security intelligence system.

Discover how Armis can enhance your asset visibility with the Armis Quick Visibility Assessment.