The Importance of Effective Asset Management in Today’s Cloud Environments
In today’s cloud-focused network environments, organizations have experienced a significant shift in the development and deployment of IT assets. With the advent of cloud technology, the deployment process has become much simpler and more efficient but often lacks centralized change management. The shared responsibility model associated with the cloud allows for more rapid deployment and scaling but can also have security impacts if not well managed and understood. This newfound ease has another potential cost – the challenge of effectively managing these assets.
Gone are the days when IT assets were confined behind on-prem firewalls, where security configurations were manually set by administrators. In those rigid environments, deploying new internet-facing assets required a complex change management process, with collaboration between network and security teams to optimize and balance functional and security requirements – with the move to cloud and hybrid environments, that burden has been reduced. Anyone with the appropriate administrative privileges can now deploy new internet-facing assets on the cloud and connect them to the internal network without extensive optimization.
While this enhanced efficiency and scalability has benefits, it often leads to a lack of visibility and control over IT assets. As organizations race to scale, they frequently lose track of the number of assets operating within their networks. These invisible and unmonitored assets can serve as backdoors for threat actors, enabling them to deliver sophisticated cyberattacks. It is extremely common for these types of assets to serve as an initial entry point or enable lateral movement in penetration testing and red teaming.
What are the risks of poor asset management?
Consider a scenario where a business deploys a new SSH server to provide third-party contractors with access to critical resources. If the SSH server is not proactively secured, any underlying vulnerabilities and risks may go unnoticed. Threat actors are quick to exploit such vulnerabilities, using automated malicious bots to scan the web for unpatched or vulnerable assets, leading to potential cyberattacks.
Furthermore, security teams often fail to recognize that third-party applications used by external entities to connect to an organization’s servers should be considered integral parts of the wider IT asset landscape. This oversight can also be attributed to the proliferation of remote working. Since the pandemic, more businesses have embraced remote work, resulting in increased usage of remote access solutions. The rapid move to remote and hybrid working meant the adoption of remote access and BYOD solutions had to be expedited and in some cases that security debt still needs to be paid. This type of rapid shift often circumvents change management processes creating blind spots within an environment.
To address these issues, organizations must place emphasis on effective asset management. A robust asset management strategy integrated into business processes enhances the security team’s operational efficiency. It provides a clear overview of the assets to monitor, enables optimization of security policies for different assets, and facilitates the configuration of existing solutions for better security. This, in turn, maximizes the return on investment from security solutions and professionals and ensures compliance with relevant regulations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and NIST.
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