Information Security

Benefits of ITAM to cyber security

An effective ITAM program is an essential part of your organization’s cyber security strategy. To be able to protect your IT resources, you should track and manage all components of your IT infrastructure. This will allow you to identify outdated hardware and software and minimize their vulnerability  to attacks. ITAM helps maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information to ensure that this information isn’t compromised when critical events arise.

A robust ITAM program will help your organization track and maintain assets as changes occur in your IT environment. Having current and accurate information of all assets will allow your organization to make informed decisions about the available resources and their usage and provides improved overall productivity and utilization of assets.

Here are a few reasons to include ITAM in your cyber security strategy:

1. Mitigates risk: When an ITAM process is in place you can reduce the threats and security risks that originate from rogue, obsolete, lost, or misconfigured IT assets.
2. Improves cyber security resiliency and provides a faster incident response: Allows organizations to focus on securing their most valuable and critical assets by implementing the right security controls. It provides visibility to easily identify the asset affected by an incident and can facilitate root cause analysis. It can also help enable faster incident responses and remediation to security alerts by revealing the location, configuration, and owner of the affected device.
3. Ensures software is updated and patched: An ITAM process allows for management of software which can help identify outdated or unpatched software. Older versions of software or unpatched software can be a security risk to your organization.
4. Determines the role of every software asset: An ITAM process will allow you to identify all software in use so that you can ensure proper licensing and avoid redundant purchasing. Knowing the operational functionality of each software will allow for proper configuration and reduce security risks.
5. Provides hardware asset control: When using ITAM tools you can identify which devices are connected to the network and if they are properly configured and compliant with security controls and current updates. They can also identify obsolete hardware assets and help you to take the necessary steps to minimize the security threats posed by stolen or lost assets.
6. Identifies the security controls for the IT asset: When implementing an ITAM process you’ll need to identify the IT assets’ operational functionalities and what security controls are required to protect them. When an incident occurs, an ITAM process can help provide you with a clear map of the IT networks. This will allow you to identify the points of failure and what needs to be done to fix them and ensure business continuity.
7. Ensures IT assets categorization: An ITAM process requires that assets be categorized by their operational functionalities and by the sensitivity of the information they are required to handle. IT assets that handle sensitive information should be categorized as critical and secured with the right tools, and if compromised, provided with an incident response process to ensure minimal damage to the organization.