Asset Management

An organisation's operational IT setup has multiple resources that can be classified under two titles namely: hardware and software. Among these resources, servers, databases, network and software applications, etc. support the operations of other resources that are critical to an organisation's operations and hence are termed as assets.

Asset management is an activity that has typically three aspects to it: Asset definition & registration, Asset valuation and Asset security. Real time Security Information Management (RSIM) covers all the three aspects of asset management and offers asset management as an inbuilt feature.

It does so as follows:

Asset definition and registration

The key task of asset management is identifying and defining the assets. The RSIM module of CNAM , then registers those assets and saves the critical information about the asset such as name of the asset, asset description, asset owner name, name of the business unit to which the asset belongs, IP address of the asset, etc. in its registry.

Asset Valuation

Once the assets are identified, defined and registered, RSIM then evaluates the assets and assigns them different severity levels based on different parameters such as vulnerabilities in the asset, analysis of the previous attacks on the asset and the criticality of that asset to the business operations.The severity levels are classified into three categories: high, medium and low. Criticality of the asset is determined by evaluating and assessing the business impact in the event of an unusual activity.The greater the impact, greater is the severity assignesd to the asset.

Asset security

The basic purpose of asset management is to provide security to the assets so that business operations continue without any hindrances. Assetvaluation plays a very important role in asset security. Based on the severity assigned to the assets, RSIM and then working in sync with its other features such as Incident & ticket management system and Event analysis console,enables an organisation to effectively mitigate any attacks on the assets. Thus, RSIM integrates all the important facets of asset management in one single package that handles all the assets in an organisation and helps to protect the assets from any external threats.