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The Importance of 100% Visibility in Cloud Asset Management

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Becca Gomby
Wednesday, Feb 15th, 2023

Cloud asset management is a fundamental component to any cloud security tool. It helps organizations to identify, track, and protect their assets in the cloud. Cloud security engineers need 100% visibility across their cloud environments to enhance their ability to harden their cloud. 

Asset management, the basics 

The baseline in asset management tools is to provide cloud security engineers with the following capabilities: 

  • Asset identification: Helps organizations to identify all the assets they have in the cloud, including servers, applications, databases, and storage containers. This information is critical for security because it allows organizations to understand the scope of their attack surface and determine which assets need to be protected.  
  • Risk assessment: Provides organizations with information about the risk associated with each of their assets. This information helps organizations prioritize their security efforts and allocate resources to their most critical assets. 
  • Access control: Helps organizations to control access to their assets. By having a clear understanding of who has access to which assets and what permissions they have, organizations can ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive data.  
  • Compliance: Helps organizations to comply with various regulations and standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2. These regulations typically require organizations to have a comprehensive inventory of their assets and regularly monitor them for security purposes. 
  • Threat detection and response: Provides organizations with real-time information about their assets, which helps them to detect and respond to threats more effectively. For example, if an unusual event occurs on one of the assets, organizations can quickly determine what it is, where it is located, and what data is stored on it, allowing them to respond more quickly and effectively. 

Why clear asset management matters in the cloud 

Without effective cloud asset management, which includes the ability to have complete visualization of your cloud environment and the ability to track trends, several issues can arise:  

  • Lack of security: Without visibility into cloud assets, it is difficult to identify and address security threats, making it more likely that sensitive data will be compromised. 
  • Compliance risks: Regulations and standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2 require organizations to have a comprehensive inventory of their assets and regularly monitor them for security purposes. Without visibility and trend tracking, organizations may not be able to comply with these requirements. 
  • Increased costs: Without visibility into cloud assets, organizations may end up paying for more resources than they need or accidentally leave unneeded resources running, leading to increased costs.  
  • Inefficient resource allocation: Without visibility into resource utilization, it can be difficult to determine which assets are being underutilized or overutilized. This can lead to inefficiencies in resource allocation and result in decreased productivity. 
  • Difficulty detecting and responding to threats: If an unusual event occurs in the cloud, it can be difficult to determine what it is and where it is located without visibility into cloud assets. This can make it more challenging to respond to security threats and resolve incidents. 
  • Lack of control over cloud resources: Without visibility into cloud assets, it is difficult to ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive data, making it more likely that data breaches will occur. 

Clear asset management is an essential component of cloud security and helps organizations to ensure the security, availability, and compliance of their assets. 

Next-generation cloud asset management, with Panoptica 

Panoptica’s CNAPP solution provides a comprehensive view of your cloud environment – whether across AWS, Azure, GCP, or Kubernetes. Our main platform Dashboard provides the high-level, critical information cloud security engineers need to know. To deep-dive into the finite details of cloud assets, users can navigate to the Inventory section of the platform.  

Panoptica recently provided an updated look and feel for cloud asset management. Our team’s goal is to help you work more efficiently and simplify your monitoring, tracking, automation capabilities, and visualization through this updated experience. Next-generation cloud security solutions should offer users the ability to dynamically track their asset management progress, visualize trends in data, follow their more essential assets to track important data, and overall enhance how teams can engage with their data.  

Panoptica’s CNAPP solution can reduce the noise in cloud environments on average by 95%, improving engineers’ ability to focus on what matters most. 

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