There are a number of factors that make up effective cybersecurity, but there is one that stands out—visibility. It’s a simple fact that you can’t protect what you aren’t even aware you have. The very best vulnerability and patch management solutions, endpoint protection, and other security tools still can’t protect devices they don’t know about. That is why Qualys has made comprehensive visibility and an accurate asset inventory the foundation and cornerstone of protection.
Qualys CEO Sumedh Thakar explains in a blog post, “You can’t secure what you do not know or can’t see. Further, you can’t protect what you do not understand. From conversations with customers to the recent string of catastrophic cyberattacks, organizations desperately need to establish a comprehensive view of their IT asset infrastructure. But that comprehensive view needs to be specific to the security team, which has a different role than IT teams concerned with inventory, software support and license oversight.”
There is also an important distinction to keep in mind, though, in terms of what different teams need to know about the assets. The IT team has a different reason for wanting to know what assets are on the network, and the information the IT team has generally does not provide the context and detail that the IT security team needs to effectively protect those assets.
“Security teams that rely on asset inventory from their IT counterparts are challenged by a lack of visibility into the security context of their assets. This visibility is critical in prioritizing the overwhelming number of issues security teams are tasked with addressing,” explains Thakar. “Understanding the risk context of every asset helps them decide what requires immediate action, and what can be done incrementally or mitigated with other changes or ignored as too low risk.”
That context is crucial from an IT security perspective. IT security professionals are typically faced with an overwhelming volume of alerts to address. If everything is important, then nothing is—so it is imperative to have the right context to understand the value of the asset in question and the potential impact of the given vulnerability so remediation and mitigation efforts can be prioritized. The goal is not necessarily to eradicate all vulnerabilities and remove risk entirely. The goal is to mitigate and reduce risk to acceptable and manageable levels—and that starts with proper prioritization.
Qualys understands the importance of visibility, which is why the company has invested heavily in asset management tools in recent years. Products like Global AssetView give IT teams a comprehensive view of assets that can be viewed and managed from a single, unified platform.
Recently, Qualys launched a new tool—Cybersecurity Asset Management (CSAM). CSAM goes a step farther than the other tools to provide the necessary context that IT security teams need. It provides valuable insight and exposes security gaps to ensure IT security teams focus their efforts where they will have the most impact. CSAM helps organizations identify all assets, detect the assets that are at risk, and prioritize response efforts to mitigate the risk.
Qualys will be at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, where comprehensive visibility and the CSAM tool will be a major focus. Stop by the Qualys booth, 1437, to learn more about CSAM and the value of leveraging the Qualys Cloud Platform.
Black Hat and Def Con this year are hybrid events—both in person and streamed online. If you aren’t making the trip to Las Vegas this year, you can visit Blackhat.com to sign up for any virtual pass (including the free virtual Business Pass).
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