FEATURE Smart factories
UNLOCKING THE BENEFITS
UNLOCKING THE BENEFITS OF AN ACCURATE IT INVENTORY
OF AN ACCURATE IT INVENTORY
Greg Virgin, CEO of Redjack, explores the importance of accurate IT asset inventories, the challenges organisations face, and the steps needed to build and
M
odern businesses rely on an increasingly complex array of interconnected IT, OT (Operational Technology),
and IoT (Internet of Things) assets. This is particularly true in manufacturing, but also in any organisation with a physical presence, where technology can include security cameras, building access controls, HVAC systems, and more. These assets span multiple environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, virtualised, and containers. For simplicity, I’ll refer to all this technology as “IT.” Amid this complexity, creating and maintaining an accurate IT asset inventory can be challenging, but it is a critical component of cyber resilience. Cyber resilience is the bridge between operational resilience and cybersecurity; it aims to ensure that businesses can protect their most critical assets and quickly restore operations in the face of outages or cyberattacks—a growing inevitability in today’s threat landscape. An accurate IT asset inventory underpins
cyber resilience, enabling organisations to: 1. See everything across all environments: Without visibility into all protect or restore critical operations. Regulations like the European Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation are beginning to mandate this visibility. 2. Map IT complexity to business
activity: Cyber resilience requires not only identifying assets but understanding how they support key business functions. Standards and frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO/IEC 27001, and CIS Controls emphasise this connection
22 February 2025 | Automation
as foundational for enterprise-wide IT, cybersecurity, and risk management. 3. Prioritise risk management and : Knowing what assets are critical to your business helps prioritise cybersecurity measures and backup and of essential operations.
An “accurate” IT asset inventory should: Include all connected assets and
devices: including servers, databases, and network infrastructure; OT and IoT devices; shadow IT (unauthorised systems) and middleware (shared infrastructure, often used for passing messages between systems). Make sure to also include external, third- party systems your business depends on. Capture dependency information: Understanding how assets interconnect and depend on each other is crucial for prioritising risks and planning business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). Be continuously updated: IT
environments are dynamic, with regular turnover in assets. Outdated inventories quickly lose their utility. Unfortunately, most organisations have poor asset inventories. Research shows that businesses know only about 80% of their assets – and only 30% of the assets critical to any given business function. This spots, particularly among high-risk assets such as single points of failure or systems unmanaged by security teams. Several challenges hinder organisations inventories, including:
1. Scale and complexity: Modern IT estates span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, often involving dynamic assets like containers. Most asset inventory tools struggle to handle the complete picture. 2. Shadow IT and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): Business units often deploy unauthorised systems, and employees’ use of personal devices further complicates 3. Resource Constraints lack the time or tools to manually update inventories. 4. : Solutions that rely solely on scanning or on integrating existing data sources fail to capture the full picture, particularly in dynamic or cloud-based environments. Most tools focus on compiling lists of known assets from many sources, when the real challenge is addressing the issue that awareness of assets correlates with organisational control over them, and business context is lacking. Steps to ensure accuracy: Building and maintaining an accurate IT asset inventory requires a shift from manual, static processes to automated, dynamic approaches. Here are some tips: 1. Focus on risk management, not just asset counting: The goal is not to track every device but to manage risks by fully understanding the organisation’s attack surface. Prioritise assets that communicate or contribute to business-critical operations. 2. Invest in asset discovery capabilities: Sensors deployed for passive network monitoring can collect communication data, helping to identify all connected assets and
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