Five Ways an Asset Inventory Helps Streamline Your Cybersecurity Budget

Not having enough budget poses a significant challenge for cybersecurity leaders. It limits their ability to invest in essential cybersecurity tools, technologies, and personnel. This hinders their ability to implement robust security measures, address emerging threats, conduct thorough risk assessments, and maintain an effective security posture. According to the IANS + Artico Search 2023 Security Budget Benchmark Summary Report, which surveyed 550 CISOs, “the average budget increase for our sample of CISOs was 6%—a significant slowdown from the 17% increase in the 2021–2022 budget cycle, marking a 65% reduction in growth.” Within the context of the wider economic slowdown in 2023, budgets are being scrutinized even more.

Security leaders can lower their budget without compromising security by implementing a risk-based approach, prioritizing critical assets, optimizing existing security tools, leveraging open-source solutions, adopting cloud-based services for cost-effectiveness, implementing efficient incident response plans, and investing in employee training to enhance cybersecurity awareness, thereby maximizing the impact of security measures within budget constraints. Having an accurate and comprehensive asset inventory is the key component needed to make this process efficient and effective.

What Is an Asset Inventory

An asset inventory is a core component of an effective cybersecurity program. It is a comprehensive list of all hardware, software, network devices, and other technology assets within an organization, whether they are based in the cloud, in containers, or on-premises. It gives you the context you need to understand interdependencies between critical assets. Having such an inventory allows you to optimize your cybersecurity planning and prioritize your efforts on the most important, business-critical functions. 

How an Asset Inventory Helps You Optimize Your Budget

When reviewing your budget you will look to improve costs when it comes to people, processes, and technology. An asset inventory can help you with all three. 

1 Prioritization

Understanding which parts of your infrastructure are critical allows you to focus your resources and efforts on protecting these areas and allocate scarce resources effectively.

An asset inventory allows you to map relationships between systems, applications, and data, helping identify dependencies that need to be considered when planning security infrastructure, fine-tuning processes, and developing business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

Identifying your critical business functions allows you to take this prioritization a step further. Critical business functions are the core activities that keep your organization running smoothly and generate revenue. Identifying which assets support critical business functions helps you prioritize and focus cybersecurity efforts on critical assets essential for business operations.

2 Risk Assessments

Risk assessments play a role in managing cybersecurity budget spend. An asset inventory aids in conducting risk assessments by identifying vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your infrastructure. This information allows organizations to implement mitigation measures to reduce the risk of potential disasters and improve overall resilience.

By identifying and prioritizing risks, cybersecurity leaders can also allocate resources more effectively, focusing on the most critical areas that pose the highest impact on the organization. This targeted approach enables informed decision-making, allowing you to optimize budget utilization while enhancing overall cybersecurity.

3 Vendor Assessment

When selecting cybersecurity service providers or vendors, organizations can use their asset inventory to evaluate the effectiveness of potential solutions. Knowing what assets you have in your infrastructure and which assets are most critical allows you to prioritize which type of security solution you need. It also gives you a concrete metric to use when evaluating competing solutions. Each security solution has its strengths and weaknesses, and making sure that the chosen solution’s strengths covers your critical assets and their known vulnerabilities makes you more secure without bloating the budget with overlapping tools. 

4 Change Management

Change is a constant. Whether it's migrating to the cloud, adapting to the use of generative AI, or planning for the advent of quantum computing, technology is constantly changing and organizations are continually having to adapt to those changes. Implementing these changes incurs a cost for the organization. A comprehensive asset inventory helps minimize these costs by maximizing the likelihood of plans being implemented correctly. Knowing what assets you have and which assets are most critical allows you to create accurate plans with realistic timelines, processes, and goals, whether they be digital transformation plans, cyber resilience plans, business continuity and disaster recovery plans, or any other type of plan that seeks to change how your organization does business. An automated asset inventory management solution also automatically tracks changes to assets, giving you a day-by-day snapshot of your environment no matter how much change is going on in the organization.

5 Compliance & Reporting

Compliance is not well-liked, but it is necessary. An asset inventory streamlines compliance and other reporting requirements by allowing you to accurately track assets and ensure that they comply with regulatory requirements. The asset inventory acts as a reference point for audits and simplifies the process of verifying adherence to regulatory standards. This proactive approach not only facilitates efficient reporting but also enhances the organization's ability to address compliance issues promptly, ensuring a robust compliance posture while minimizing the time and effort spent.

Conclusion

Given the notable slowdown in cybersecurity budget growth reported in 2023, there is a need for organizations to streamline and optimize their spending. Security leaders can do this by leveraging the power of an accurate and comprehensive asset inventory and adopting a risk-based approach. This foundational tool not only helps you optimize budget spend by prioritizing critical assets but also aids in risk assessments, vendor assessments, and change management. By understanding the interdependencies between assets and focusing efforts on critical business functions, organizations can enhance cybersecurity measures while effectively managing budget constraints. 

About Redjack

In the dynamic landscape of cybersecurity, an asset inventory management solution is a crucial tool in ensuring a resilient and cost-effective cybersecurity strategy.

The Redjack platform includes an AI engine that analyzes the communications between the assets in your network in order to give you a comprehensive view of your connected infrastructure. Beyond that, the Redjack solution automatically identifies which assets are connected to critical business functions and the interdependencies between assets. 

This massively scalable solution arms you with the information you need to develop a data-centric strategy to improve the efficiency of your cybersecurity and enhance incident response planning.

Contact us to learn how Redjack has been helping the CIOs and CISOs of the world's largest corporations and government agencies manage their cyber risk.