What is Asset Discovery?
Asset discovery is a network scanning tool that helps identify, catalog, and monitor all your IT assets. These assets can include hardware devices such as servers, computers, routers, switches, printers, software applications, virtual machines, and cloud-based resources.
The asset discovery tool can be used with or without an agent. Businesses can use this tool to scan networks, collect data, and analyze information about their assets. This enables them to create and maintain up-to-date asset inventories, facilitating informed decision-making and enhanced security of their IT assets.
How does IT Asset Discovery Work?
IT asset discovery employs various techniques and technologies to identify and catalog assets within an organization’s IT infrastructure. This process typically involves the following steps:
- Network Scanning: An active or passive scan within the organization’s network to identify connected devices, including servers, computers, routers, switches, printers, and more.
- Collecting Asset Data: Once the devices are identified, the IT asset discovery tool will capture the asset’s details, such as IP address, MAC address, device type, manufacturer name, active time, operating system, installed applications, and other crucial information.
- Analyzing Data: After data collection, this data is analyzed and categorized based on various attributes, such as criticality, ownership, and compliance status. This analysis helps organizations prioritize asset management activities and identify potential risks or vulnerabilities within their IT infrastructure.
- Update & Monitoring: Once asset discovery tools are deployed, they can scan and locate new IT assets automatically. Using this, you can get pre-installed software and applications on each new device, set rules, and provide enterprises with regular updates on their assets.
What is Active & Passive Asset Discovery?
Active Asset Discovery: Active asset discovery involves actively probing devices and systems within the network to gather information about connected assets. This entails multiple configuration inputs and can also impact the speed of your network.
Passive Asset Discovery: Passive asset discovery involves monitoring network traffic to identify assets without actively probing devices. It requires each device to send a Syslog, which is less intrusive and can provide insights into the devices not responding to active scanning, such as IoT devices or network applications.
Benefits of IT Asset Discovery
Implementing IT asset discovery offers numerous benefits for organizations looking to manage their IT infrastructure and optimize asset utilization effectively. Some of the top benefits include:
1. Enhanced Visibility
Most IT asset discovery tools offer the ability to gain end-to-end visibility into the organization’s assets. This visibility enables organizations to understand their asset landscape better, identify potential risks or vulnerabilities, and make informed decisions about asset management.
2. Single Source of Information
For large organizations, having a manual or siloed database of the company’s assets can lead to inconsistencies in asset information. This can lead to security errors and blind spots, leading to breaches that are hard to monitor.
With asset discovery tools, the entire organization can get an end-to-end list of all the IT assets and networks. This way, it is easy to monitor and helps improve monitoring processes.
3. Security Optimization
By identifying all assets within the IT environment, asset discovery helps organizations improve their security posture. It enables organizations to detect unauthorized or rogue devices, identify vulnerabilities, and ensure compliance with security policies and regulations.
4. Ensures Asset Compliance
Asset discovery is crucial in ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards. By maintaining accurate and up-to-date inventories of IT assets, organizations can demonstrate compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others.
5. Cost Optimization
As organizations can make better decisions about their IT assets, they can use asset discovery tools to help them track current device requirements and make updates as required. This includes:
- License and app upgrades
- Tracking unused applications or licenses that can be removed
- Predict future needs based on current usage and behavior
- Gain Complete Visibility Into Your Business With IT Asset Discovery Solution