Organizations that maintain an accurate inventory of all digital assets, including devices, servers, and applications, can reduce their overall attack surface.

Hackers continuously scan their victims, looking for unpatched devices and applications. Once they have discovered a system, application, or device that is unpatched or behind in operating system maintenance, the hacker will exploit it.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions are critical for organizations because they create a unified platform for collaboration, inventory management, compliance validation, and employee resource workflows. Synchronizing these pillars into one system enables organizations to reduce attacks against their assets by ensuring they update them with proper patches while decreasing the number of orphan devices.

Are you considering an ITAM project? Contact the experts at Teqtivity today to discuss your asset management strategy!

What are the Significant Pillars of an ITAM strategy?

An ITAM strategy comprises several pillars. Each pillar plays a critical role in the asset management organizational strategy and helps reduce cyberattacks against organizational assets.

Device Asset Management
Corporate-Owned Software Asset Management
Saas-based license consumption and disposition management

Device Asset Management

An organization with 10,000 employees continues to add new devices and capabilities to best serve its internal clients. With device management, organizations can easily spend on new equipment without regard for the existing disposition.

Supporting 10,000 employees’ telecommunications, data, software application, and remote access requirements could become an asset inventory of 70,000 or more devices. Even with organizations approving bring-your-own-device (BYOD), these devices pose several potential vulnerabilities that must be managed or accounted for.

Once an employee is onboarded within the human resources (HR) system, the ITAM system generates a ticket. The ticket sets off a series of workflows, including allocating an Active Directory (AD) account, provisioning laptops, applications, and mobile devices, and allocating cloud storage space.

The ITAM also works in reverse. When employees become separated from their current employer, a new ticket is generated within the HR system to shut off access to all corporate digital assets, email accounts, and devices.

Another critical value ITAMs deliver is the ability to quickly wipe devices and remote access. Securing data and devices from previous employees helps prevent cybersecurity events, including data exfiltration and other cyber risks.

Corporate-Owned Software Asset Management

As more organizations press ahead with their digital transformation strategies, including re-engineering their internal applications for rapid deployment, managing these assets is critical to reducing cyberattacks against the organization.

One of the more common attacks hackers use is their ability to insert malicious code into existing applications. Organizations develop their applications into three separate areas: production, stage, and development. Hackers, fully aware of this, will use their various adversarial tools to look for vulnerable systems. Many of these vulnerable systems exist within the stage and development areas.

ITAM tools help track all digital assets within the stage and development areas, including hosts and applications.

ITAM’s ability to report consumption of corporate-owned applications along with reporting on vulnerabilities is a critical component supporting its cybersecurity vulnerability management program.

SaaS-based licensing Consumption Management

Another critical compliance piece relates to managing license consumption and governance with various enterprise license agreements (ELA). Organizations that cannot validate the accuracy of software license consumption inventory often have to pay a true-up fee back to the software manufacturers. ITAM’s ability to report license consumption accurately results in considerable cost savings for the organization. ITAM’s strategy for compliance governance supports a strong return on investment (ROI).

ITAM solutions also play a critical role in the organization’s financial and cybersecurity protection. Once separated from the organization, moving employee access to SaaS-based applications is vital. SaaS-based applications contain the organization’s most sensitive data, including employee information, customer records, and financial data. Legal consequences, including fines and lawsuits, will occur if this information becomes compromised.

Removing access to SaaS-based applications is becoming increasingly important as more organizations migrate towards a BYOD strategy that extends access to these applications from any device. ITAM’s ability to shut off federated access to these cloud assets is critical in reducing potential risks to the organization’s cyber assets. This also reduces subscription license fees during the renewal period.

How is Maintaining Accuracy In ITAM Components Relevant to Cybersecurity?

Organizations looking for solutions to help reduce their compliance costs should consider an ITAM strategy. HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and others require organizations to maintain their critical assets, including patching their devices. Organizations have proven their system patch-level compliance and accurate asset inventory management through their automated reporting system.

ITAMs support security policies, including access to physical assets and outdated software, and help maintain an updated and detailed inventory, all of which support their cybersecurity strategy.

Why Teqtivity?

ITAM platforms are not plug-in solutions. Organizations investing in ITAM recognize this as a critical tier-one platform for supporting several business and technical requirements, including asset inventory management. This platform provides valuable insight into digital assets, secures workflow lifecycle management of devices and software, and helps the organization lower its operations costs.

Successful ITAM deployments provide a single data source, lower operations costs, more access to reporting information, license true-ups, and compliance audits.

Unsuccessful ITAM deployments allow hackers to access vulnerable critical components within the enterprise, including hosts, devices, and data. ITAM’s vital role in reducing the attack surfaces within the digital infrastructure becomes part of a continuous asset lifecycle management process and a more secure approach to assessment management.

Organizations seeking a partner in the ITAM market will find Teqtivity to be the best choice. With years of experience deploying and supporting ITAM platforms, Teqtivity understands how critical this functionality is to organizations.

If you plan to deploy ITAM soon, the journey starts with a free consultation with the experts at Teqtivity. Click here to schedule your first discussion and demo.

How Does IT Asset Management Benefit Cybersecurity?