Top 10 Reasons you need a Continuous, Comprehensive, Authoritative, Asset Inventory

It is no longer enough to just know the basics of an organization’s cloud, IT, loT, OT, IoMT, BYoD, 5G, and edge assets. Teams need near-real-time, multidimensional contextual views that help them understand granular details about specific assets and their behavior.

Here are the top 10 reasons that justify the need for (and value of) complete asset visibility in IT environments:

1. Digital Transformation has expedited the adoption of IoT, OT, and other non-traditional assets

The number of devices being connected to the Internet every day keeps growing exponentially – – by 2023 there will be 3 Billion IoT Devices connected to the Internet on cellular connections alone.  Securing devices on cellular networks is challenging enough but when these devices are critical to an organizations operation it takes on an additional dimension of complexity.  Many Operational Technology (OT) environments cannot utilize traditional agent or scanning tools due to the sensitivity of the assets and the risk of disruption.  With the advent of things like Industry 4.0, OT environments are becoming more and more dependent on networking and Cloud technologies to create efficiencies. While these two worlds are coming together, each has different goals, technologies, and operating philosophies. IT and OT Security teams are charged with ensuring the continued operations of these endpoints which oftentimes prioritize time to market over security.

2. These assets are mission critical to revenue production – at every level of the supply chain

IoT/OT devices directly monitor and/or control equipment, assets, processes and events. Almost every single vertical has become dependent on them to enable revenue and/or cost-savings. 

The most obvious example is Industrial production; every industry has become completely reliant on these devices as part of their flow. 

However, there are many more examples; here are just a few: 

• Hospitality has become dependent on these devices to save costs in energy and staff (automating processes that were previously very labor intensive).
• New Healthcare IoT devices continuously come to market, both for consumers and healthcare professionals; Hospitals have been invaded for hundreds of IoT devices everywhere, from monitoring patients, and the environment, to helping surgeries.
• Retailers have also become dependent on these devices, both in “brick and mortar” stores, in warehouses and in shipping operations.
• Banks have thousands, or even millions of IoT devices spread all over their operational territory: it all started with ATMs, but now even their retail branches have myriad IoT devices in them. All are key factors in customer satisfaction and retention, and therefore to their bottom line.

3. Over 90% of these connected assets are unmanaged

Unfortunately, very few of these devices can actually run an agent on them; they were just not designed to allow one to be installed, and they don’t come with one that can be leveraged by 3rd party management products. The end result is that they are unmanaged:

4. You cannot protect what you cannot see

Without a management agent, most of these devices become basically invisible or at least unidentifiable to IT departments. Active Vulnerability Scanners may be able to find them (assuming nobody minds the effects of active scans on the network) but they will likely not be able to identify them accurately – so IT departments won’t know how to protect them.

The really concerning problem here though is that a huge percentage of IT departments are woefully unaware of the fact that the majority of unmanaged devices are essentially invisible to them.

5. Armis allows you to assess your true Organizational Risk profile

With the Armis platform, organizations have a single, trusted source of truth with near-real-time, multidimensional views into the identities, configurations, connections, changes, software, and location for every asset on the network. Additionally, intuitive search capabilities put up-to-date threat information at your fingertips, making it easier to stay abreast of critical vulnerability remediation.

All of that means you can immediately cut to the chase for the most critical vulnerabilities, ensuring your team is making the maximum impact in the time it has.

6. Track risk progress over time

The combination of poor visibility of devices, limited network segregation between different categories of technology, and the amount of out of date or unsupported systems suggests that many organizations are running some substantial – and wholly unnecessary – risks.

Armis allows you to track trends over time to ensure you are making progress toward organizational maturity goals – which is an essential need of any well-run organization.

This allows companies to set proper KPIs for their IT department, and track against them, including setting MBOs, both at the personal, organizational and corporate level.

7. Recover Unnecessary OpEx while eliminating Tech Debt

Another thing Armis allows you to do: keep a close eye on factors like technical debt to ensure asset firmware and operating systems are up to date and licenses and certificates are current and aligned with current organizational needs.

Implementing unified visibility and control of all managed and unmanaged IT, OT, IoT and IIoT devices within a corporate infrastructure has also been shown to reduce OpEx.

8. 99% Faster SOC Investigations

The SOC team constantly struggles with needle-in-the-haystack scenarios when it comes to responding to critical alerts. Given the fact that SOC teams are generally lean and overloaded, every piece of added context about a specific asset can pay dividends. 

The Armis platform provides rich asset context for any asset that is the subject of an alert and helps reduce SOC investigations by up to 50 percent (based on feedback from Armis customers). Between data generated through passive monitoring and aggregated from other tools and systems, Armis enables analysts to quickly answer:

• Is this asset protected by an endpoint agent, and is that agent in a healthy state?
• Who uses this asset?
• Who do I call when remediation action is needed?
• Which other assets has this account been associated with?
• Are there user accounts with a suspicious number of associated assets?
• Where is this asset physically located?

9. 2.7X Improvement in CMDB accuracy

With Armis, you can discover 5x more assets than CMDBs, including rogue and unmanaged assets, and gain a single, trusted source of asset truth for security and management efforts.

See and secure all assets within your environment with Armis and its Collective Asset Intelligence Engine. Swiftly identify each asset and establish what is normal versus an anomaly in your IT space. 

Gaps in host security deployments are all too common. Armis provides a window into every asset so you can eliminate gaps and optimize IT environment security.

10. Automate CMDB updates and workflows, and pass audits with ease

Armis integrates with ServiceNow, making sure your CMDB always has the latest details about every device in your environment for a complete and up-to-date asset inventory whenever you need it. Armis also performs continuous, real-time risk analysis of device behavior, and can generate alerts, open trouble tickets, or trigger policy-based blocking or quarantine actions automatically.

Having these capabilities also makes audits much easier; Armis customers always have version control, formal sign off procedures and clear ownership and accountability of every single device. That ensures any audit or review is passed with ease, and also warrants the documentation provided during the audit is up to date, and more importantly, relevant.