Attack Surface Management

Chapter 5. Automating Asset Discovery

Any organization starting its ASM journey needs a complete asset inventory. Too often, that involves some unfortunate but well-meaning person grabbing a notepad and exploring which departments own certain assets. Unfortunately, once they’ve jotted down every laptop, server, and software license they can find, the list is still full of holes. Remote workers’ devices are missing, cloud services hide in plain sight, and virtual machines lurk in the shadows.

Reality sinks in as your notepad overflows with scribbled pages: manual asset discovery is a nightmare. It’s time-consuming, error-prone, and hopelessly incomplete in the face of modern IT complexity. Spreadsheets can’t capture the complete picture when assets live on-premises, in the cloud, and everywhere in between.

Welcome to the wild world of asset management, where “good enough” discovery is never enough, yet often it’s the best an organization has. The good news is that there is a smarter approach, and that’s important in ASM, where a single overlooked asset can spell disaster with unmanaged risk.

This smarter approach is called automated asset discovery. It’s the secret weapon for mapping that tangled web of hardware, software, and services that power our businesses. With the right tools, you can illuminate every corner of the IT environment, from physical servers to virtual desktops to SaaS applications.

The hard truth is that in today’s hybrid, multicloud world, you can’t protect ...