Enrich inventory with asset intelligence
Effective asset intelligence requires evolving from management to context-aware optimisation.
Asset Intelligence is variously defined, for example Deloitte’s1 approach to it is that it integrates artificial intelligence, IoT data, and predictive analytics to optimise asset lifecycle management, operational visibility, and risk reduction. Their frameworks shift organisations from reactive maintenance to proactive, data-driven intelligence across physical, digital, and operational environments.
A simpler view of it would be that Asset Intelligence is a concept of inventory enriched with context and continuous awareness to provide easy access to relevant information. This in turn translates into the ability to secure and optimise that asset.
The good old days – but were they?
Traditionally, security and other tools have acted as systems of discovery and protection providing siloed records where each asset is managed in isolation by various teams in the organization. Today, in the always connected and driven by AI world Asset Intelligence is critical to secure your business. You can no longer rely on static inventories or Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) to understand your environment. As cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, identities, and AI agents become increasingly dynamic, organisations need continuous, real-time, Asset Intelligence that provides not just visibility, but context, relationships, ownership, and historical insights.
Back in the day, information emanated from an array of teams including, systems and service management, plus security teams with resulting duplication of different data points required by the teams to perform their duties. To compound the duplication of data issue these systems and processes were built for relatively static and stable IT environments. Today, the environment is increasingly dynamic and in order to protect your business there is a real need for continuous, real-time Asset Intelligence that provides context, relationship, ownership and historical insights. The bottom line is companies can no longer rely on correlation and reporting.
The stark reality of the digital world
Modern business environments with their supporting infrastructure, are changing at machine speed. Records are updated in calendar time leaving teams with significant blind spots when designing and managing robust architectures built for scale and reliability. Assets and business services are instantly added increasing the risk as new assets are not dynamically identified and prioritised.
Teams relied on data clumping of all information provided, if they were to ease their burden. However, aggregation does not solve the problem alone, pulling all the data into a single point is a good start but not the destination. Clustered data needs to be consolidated into a usable context layer that deals with source authority, conflict resolution, confidence tracking and drift (otherwise known as slow uncontrolled changes that need to be detected over time)detection combined with ownership. Without this contextual layer the aggregated view is only as strong as the least trustworthy source feeding into it and possibly scanning frequency overlaps
If you were to consider that no one system of record is the single source of truth, how do you provide durable/usable context. To achieve this will require a dynamic reconciliation layer above numerous data sources. It’s important to note this is not a new or better CMDB, nor is it another network scanner, or a consolidation identity provider. It is rather a layer that connects to all the sources and allows you to intelligently aggregate the data so you could make informed decisions based on context and exposure.
Know your assets
The essence of knowing what you have in order to manage or secure the asset, is not a new or novel idea, it is a practice that has to move from asset management to dynamic Asset Intelligence, the use of asset data to improve security posture and continues availability of business services.
You need to move from the position of asking what do we have in our inventory to one that addresses the following:
What assets do we have in our inventory?
Who owns those assets?
What business processes does they support?
Are they managed and if yes, by how many tools?
How do you know that all the security controls by the various domain owners are present on all the devices they need to be?What systems are they connected to and who is using them?
What business risks do they represent and what is compromised if they are lost?
How have they changed over time? Essentially, you need a record of the history of your assets.
In a nutshell, as businesses and infrastructure providers deploy more AI enabled assets plus dynamic workload provisioning; security teams will not be able to enforce and deploy the correct controls. This can only be achieved with Asset Intelligence correlation between business processes and infrastructure deployment.
Sources: https://www.deloitte.com/za/en/services/consulting/perspectives/deloitte-africas-operational-intelligence-centre.html
Brief Bio: Harold van Graan, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Solid8 Technologies.
Harold van Graan has over 26 years’ experience in the Enterprise Application arena. His career spans technologies that aim to optimise and secure this environment. His expertise ranges from mainframe to today’s cloud platforms. Cyber security has been an integral part of his journey with a focus on Identity, Access and Fraud management.
During this period Harold has operated within the OEM milieu and system integration framework, and most recently applied his specialist knowledge of this environment to the distribution channel.
Harold has an in-depth understanding of how technology drives organisations and how business processes and enablement, ensures customer service and first class CX experiences.