We’ve discussed the challenges of getting to a comprehensive IT asset inventory, and the key considerations when going to solve this problem. What we haven’t discussed is the impact this comprehensive asset inventory may have to the organization.

Both IT and security teams rely heavily on an understanding of the assets within the organization. Today, those operations are based on an assumption that the inventory coming from single sources like the vulnerability management tools, Active Directory, or the endpoint security console are accurate. 

But as we discussed previously, that is a flawed assumption and an inventory from a single source is not accurate: only by converging and reconciling inventories across these sources can you get a true picture of all of your IT assets.

Your existing processes and tools rely on an accurate IT Asset Inventory, which is why this quality of the data is so important. Your security team is already looking for gaps in your security deployments; an automated IT asset inventory will save your team time discovering those gaps so you can focus your time and effort on closing them.

By not only ingesting data to create that comprehensive inventory, it’s important to export that good data into the products your team already uses, to enable the people and processes to be more effective. You can support use cases such as:

• • Finding devices that are missing endpoint security controls
  • Providing IPs to the vulnerability scanners to comprehensively scan
  • Supporting security investigations to quickly identify which system had a specific IP address at specific points in time
  • Ensuring patch management systems are monitoring all your devices
  • Pushing clean, accurate records into your CMDB
  • And many more…

As you can see, when security teams are already overstretched with initiatives, an asset inventory initiative can have outsized impact on helping your team to prioritize its focus on the most pressing IT security issues.

Next, we’ll talk about how the organization needs to come together to make this initiative a success.