From CAASM to Risk Managament
This past decade has seen IT environments rapidly expand in scale and complexity. The rise of the cloud, hybrid environments, mobile devices, and home offices has expanded the attack surface exponentially. It has become a challenge to even know what assets you have, let alone to properly manage and secure them. It doesn’t help that both tasks are the responsibility of two different teams.
While the IT team is managing the technology estate internally, keeping everything running smoothly, the security team is watching the perimeter for external threats. The reality is that, for effective risk management, close cooperation between both teams is essential. This is where CAASM comes into play, bridging the gap between ITAM and Cybersecurity.
The Role of IT Teams in Cybersecurity
Despite the existence of cybersecurity teams, IT teams still play a major role in improving your organization’s cybersecurity profile. As they are managing your IT estate, they are often the first ones to pick up on outdated software, misconfigurations, and possible vulnerabilities. Their insight into your technology assets and their interdependencies also allows them to better assess individual assets’ risk profiles.
All of this information is essential both in risk assessment strategies and incident response. With the right tools, IT teams can gain full visibility into your IT estate and provide insights that are vital to cybersecurity teams to shore up the defenses of your network.
The Trouble with Data Silos
Currently, the exchange of information between IT and cybersecurity teams is often non-existent. IT teams are sitting on a wealth of asset data, but security teams have no access to it. Certain security tools will collect their own data, but this is often limited to what is needed for its specific task. This creates a number of isolated and incomplete data silos, always lacking true full visibility.
However, the full visibility is there, in the IT team’s ITAM and inventory tools like Lansweeper. These solutions create a comprehensive view of every technology asset – hardware and software, physical and virtual – on your network. This creates a single source of truth for asset data that can fuel any IT or security project or goal.
Bridging the Gap With CAASM
This IT asset visibility is the basis of cyber asset attack surface management or CAASM. CAASM solutions gather information on all devices that make up your attack surface effectively eliminating data silos by providing a single source of truth that can be used for all your IT and security needs. After all, you can’t protect what you don’t know you have. CAASM provides that much-needed visibility that can then be used to fuel informed decision-making for risk assessment, incident response, and resource optimization.
How Lansweeper Fuels Your Cybersecurity Efforts
Many CAASM tools also contain additional features to activate the asset data to provide valuable insights. In Lansweeper’s case, a combination of reports and dashboards lets you easily extract the asset data you need the most. Comprehensive network diagrams show you where an asset is located in your network and its interdependencies, which allows you to more accurately assess the risk profile of individual assets, as well as isolate compromised machines or spot rogue devices.
The feature that finds itself the most on the bridge between ITAM and cybersecurity would be the vulnerability insights. This overview shows you a list of all potentially vulnerable devices, along with the vulnerabilities that are threatening your assets, the CVSS score, any additional information available from the vendor, and patch availability. This vulnerability information, as well as the visibility into the surrounding IT ecosystem, allows you to make an informed risk assessment, and more accurately prioritize your incident response and remediation efforts, and more efficiently allocate available resources.
What’s more, Lansweeper integrates seamlessly with your existing IT stack, fuelling your cybersecurity tools with always up-to-date asset data.
Lansweeper for Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management
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Download the White PaperBoost Your Cybersecurity Profile by Bridging the Gap
CAASM isn’t just yet another acronym trying to reinvent the wheel. It is simply bridging the gap between two distinct, but deeply intertwined departments, IT and security. IT teams are often sitting on a wealth of IT data that could make the security team’s job significantly easier and more efficient, while also playing a key role in keeping a network up-to-date, well-patched, and – most importantly – properly secured.
CAASM tools like Lansweeper offer a bridge between the two by providing a single source of truth for all IT data. They gather asset data from across your technology estate, creating a central repository and providing the tools to activate this treasure trove of information. Easily accessible IT insights based on comprehensive IT data can then be used to inform decision-making in risk management, resource allocation, incident response, and prioritization.