For all businesses, the emphasis is now firmly focused on the significance of data, both in terms of how it can be used to drive a business forward but if it is compromised how it can drag a business backwards.

It stands as the most extensive, widely dispersed, and invaluable critical asset in your possession.

Your data wields its influence across all aspects of your business goals and objectives, ranging from revenue growth to the mitigation of security risks. However, it remains a glaring deficiency that organisations often lack a fundamental inventory for their digital assets, especially considering how important we all know they are to the organisation.

Technology leaders are tasked with safeguarding these invaluable digital assets, yet they often lack clarity to explain what they are doing and the level of exposure their business is facing. Consequently, business leadership often does not have an effective application inventory nor a documented risk hierarchy and this is a concern that has significant potential consequences for IT leadership.

This article delves into the significance, the challenges involved, and the reasons why it is absolutely essential for organisations to truly comprehend their network and manage their attack surface to protect their critical assets.

Understanding your digital assets

Understanding your digital assets, mapping them to applications, and assessing their importance based on the CIA Triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability which is essential for resource management, risk mitigation, prioritisation, compliance, incident response, and cost efficiency within an organisations IT infrastructure. It ensures that the organisations technology ecosystem aligns with its strategic goals and security needs.

Sounds complex - but it does not have to be and ditno helps with this.

The dependencies associated with these assets

Even applications that are less critical to the organisation can play a significant role in the security of the overall network. Understanding the cause and effect of all of your applications is therefore an important action to take. Combining this with effective and real-time monitoring and preventing lateral movement through these applications, is essential to reducing security breach impact, protecting data, and maintaining a robust and resilient cyber security posture.

Have you got this view and are you confident with the interconnectivity you are allowing within your network?

Network Governance

A well-defined network governance model is essential for promoting consistency, security, efficiency, compliance, risk management, visibility, observability, and accountability in network management. It helps network engineers and DevOps to easily identify misconfigurations and exposures, leading to a more resilient and secure network infrastructure.

Explaining this approach and delivering confidence from the business that you have the risks covered is also critical and often poorly communicated.  

ditno helps make your governance comprehensive and easy to report on.

Reducing your attack surface

Being able to assess your digital assets against a documented governance model is a huge step forward.  Especially when you are able to articulate how you are ensuring that the business is delivering on its risk priorities of Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, as well as delivering on the trust ratings now required to evidence compliance.

Having this approach empowers organisations to prioritise their activities effectively, reducing the attack surface and managing risks more strategically.

Working with ditno helps optimise resource allocation, enhances incident response, and promotes cost efficiency, which ultimately leads to a more resilient and secure digital environment.  That has to be the definition of a win-win.

Continuous Improvement and Proactive Threat Modelling

Visibility of your risk exposure enhances collaboration, improves reporting, which in turn leads to more strategic decision-making.  Having this solid platform creates a culture of continuous improvement and proactive threat modelling, which essentially means you create higher and higher standards to work to.

This proactive stance enables the organisation to stay ahead of emerging threats and continuously enhance its security posture, ultimately ensuring the protection of critical assets and data.

Comprehensive reporting

Clear reporting to the board and executive teams is essential for effective governance, risk management, and security. It ensures that decision-makers have the information they need to make informed choices, allocate resources strategically, and lead the organisation in a manner that prioritises security and risk mitigation.

To find our more about how to identify and protect your critical assets - reach out and have a no obligation conversation with one of the team at ditno.