How to maintain an accurate inventory of IT assets
Maintaining an up-to-date enterprise inventory system is very challenging. Enterprise assets frequently change with added and retired devices, physical machines migrating to virtual and various stakeholders constantly installing and updating software. Inaccurate inventory makes managing compliance and cyber-risk very difficult. Knowing what you are protecting is the first critical step in IoT security.
Modern tools can help with this issue and deliver relevance as they understand every detail of usage, configuration, and posture of assets in a network. Such tools can also measure the overall security posture of devices, ensuring that the riskiest and most critical assets are prioritized.
With proper tools in place, IT pros can practice the following steps that will allow them to have a close watch over IoT devices:
o Analyze the entire attack surface and calculate the business risk for every asset across the enterprise
o Identify vulnerabilities and risk across a broad set of 100+ attack vectors for all types of assets, including IoT
o Prioritize based on business criticality and other factors such as vulnerabilities, active threats, and your existing security controls
o Address and mitigate any possibility for cyberattacks preemptively with prescriptive fixes
IoT security is still a work in progress. Still, the more health organizations can have a holistic view of their assets, the better prepared they can be to handle the increasing numbers of attack vectors for traditional, cloud, mobile, and IoT assets. As IoT evolves, healthcare organizations can deliver great societal value, harnessing its power while carefully managing their implementation and ongoing cybersecurity.
About the author: Dr. Vinay Sridhara is the chief technology officer for Balbix.Back to HCB News
