Asset management has emerged as a primary opportunity for hospitals and healthcare systems to invest in as they 'up' their cybersecurity game and place a greater emphasis on risk reduction. This is, although overall spending may not yet match the totality of the cybersecurity threat landscape.
FREMONT, CA: There is an ongoing dispute as to whether asset management is the most crucial task in organizational cybersecurity or if it is a minor but crucial element of a much larger risk reduction puzzle.
Proponents will argue that without unimpeded access to the precise number of applications and devices connecting to or endeavoring to connect to the corporate network(s), no business can proactively protect against attacks, manage vulnerabilities, and accelerate incident response. Those less optimistic about asset management as a panacea cite its inherent complexities and the enormous hurdles posed by the Internet of Things (IoT) development.
Almost everyone agrees that asset management is a net benefit to a company's overall security posture, notwithstanding divergent opinions. Perhaps this is why so many government agencies—from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) in the United States to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSE) and the European Banking Authority abroad—rank asset management as the top recommendation for cybersecurity preparedness.
TRADITIONAL CHALLENGES IN ASSET MANAGEMENT
Asset management has long provided a unique set of obstacles to large enterprises, leading to deemphasizing the program in favor of investing more in detection and response technologies.
From a device perspective, gathering the total number of unmanaged programs and workstations with networking capability can be a years-long hassle needing substantial IT and security resources. This is further compounded by the rise of hybrid and remote work due to Covid-19 and the popularity of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) rules that allow devices not under corporate control to access corporate networks.
Even when firms believe they have entire or near-total visibility into their assets, they have not had an easy way to evaluate data in the past. As with asset discovery, the complexity of asset inventory analysis has increased in recent years. Primarily as a result of the acceleration of cloud migration and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments within corporate environments, the shift to edge data centers, and other digital transformation and future work initiatives that strain network usage.
These obstacles have prevented hospitals and health systems from achieving asset management objectives.
