As the world becomes increasingly digitized, cybercrime has become one of the most significant threats that organizations face. Environments are expanding at a rapid pace and cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems and networks, making security hygiene a high priority for preventing attacks. In this blog post, we will explore why asset visibility is essential to good cybersecurity hygiene. 

Asset visibility is the ability to see everything connected to a network, from servers and workstations to Shadow IT and IoT devices. It involves collecting data about each device, including what it is, where it is, and what it is interconnected with.  

When protecting your organization from cybercrime, the first step is to fully understand your environment and all that needs to be secured. You cannot protect what you cannot see. It sounds simple enough, but mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, and even onboarding remote new hires can significantly and rapidly expand your security team’s responsibilities. If you are not equipped to properly identify, manage, and secure your new assets, they become an immediate liability. 

Asset visibility is critical for several reasons: 

1. Identify Unknown Assets: Without asset visibility, it’s impossible to know what assets exist on your network or whether they are secure. This lack of visibility leaves you open to vulnerabilities that weaken your security posture. By identifying all assets, you can identify vulnerabilities proactively and take steps to mitigate them. 
2. Improve Attack Response Time: When you have full visibility into your assets, you can detect and respond to attacks faster. In the event of a security incident, you can quickly determine which devices are affected and take remedial action before the attack spreads. 
3. Ensure Compliance: Many industries have strict compliance requirements that organizations must meet to avoid penalties and fines. Asset visibility enables you to monitor and manage assets across your network, helping ensure compliance with regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS. 
4. Strengthen Your Security Posture: Asset visibility provides insights into your network’s security posture. You can identify unapproved devices and applications, unauthorized accounts, and unusual network activity, which can all be indicators of a potential attack. 
5. Continuous Monitoring: Knowing the status of a device or network last week, or even yesterday, isn’t good enough. Continual asset discovery ensures that you have the latest up-to-date information on all assets. 

In conclusion, asset visibility is crucial to good cybersecurity hygiene. It enables you to identify unknown assets, improve response times, ensure compliance, achieve continuous monitoring, and strengthen your security posture. Without asset visibility, your organization is at risk of cyberattacks that could lead to data breaches, reputational damage, and financial losses. Therefore, it’s essential to invest in tools and processes that provide asset visibility and continuously monitor your network for potential threats. 

FireMon’s Asset Manager, formerly Lumeta, is a real-time network visibility solution that monitors an organization’s entire environment for anomalies, potential threats, and compliance violations. It continuously scans and discovers the entire network infrastructure for every device and connection including firewalls, routers, end points, and cloud devices. Other asset discovery tools require a person to initiate asset discovery searches, wasting precious time and leaving assets vulnerable. Asset Manager has been around for over 22 years and is used by many Fortune 500 companies. It is largely recognized for its consistency, scalability, and reliability. On average, Asset Manager finds 30-70% more assets than our competitors, which are potentially thousands of unprotected devices waiting to become an attack vector for cybercriminals. 

Contact us to find out more about FireMon’s Asset Management solution.