The drastic increase in the number of cyber-attacks has driven organizations to invest heavily in cybersecurity. With enterprise applications running most of the operations, software is a difficult corporate asset to manage, often inducing massive financial waste and cybersecurity risks. Unlike physical assets, software is extremely hard to inventory and keep track of. Apart from tracking software usage, organizations must also ensure that the usage is well within the regulatory compliance. An organization can be subject to unbudgeted penalties if the software doesn’t comply with regulatory terms. Automated asset management helps keep these parameters in check and at the same time, avoid software idle time. The automation technology substantially eliminates inefficiencies, financial waste, and un-budgeted software license compliance risks with the help of software license optimization.
An unmanaged software estate is prone to tremendous cybersecurity risks. This propels organizations toward implementing robust security standards and requirement frameworks to build a strong security posture against these risks. The automated asset management requires effective cybersecurity principles that are comprehensive in continuous software and hardware asset discovery and inventory to fend off these risks. Employing critical security controls can help manage and inventory all hardware devices on the network while allowing only authorized software to install or execute. While the asset management and cybersecurity teams duplicate activities under license optimization and vulnerability management, gaps are created between the departments. Without the awareness of the other’s activities, there is a chance of a coverage gap between the departments, posing a significant risk to the effectiveness of their operations. To avoid this gap, automated asset management merges with cybersecurity measures by adopting its operations to reduce extra expenditures while eliminating the cybersecurity and regulatory compliance gaps.
