Last time, we talked about how challenging it is to get a comprehensive view of your inventory from your many siloed security tools.
One approach we’ve seen teams take is to perform a manual reconciliation of inventory reports from the different IT systems. They will request the inventory reports from each respective IT admin: Active Directory, the endpoint security admin, the patch management and vulnerability teams.
However, this approach has major drawbacks.
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- First, the effort can take hours, and recent data from ESG indicates that half of companies require more than 80 hours each time they create an asset inventory.
- Secondly, any manual effort is going to be error prone – different systems output data differently, and not all that data may align with other systems.
- Lastly, our environments are extremely dynamic. The inventory reports that each system outputs are simply a snapshot at one point in time — by the time the reconciliation effort is complete, the inventory is already obsolete.
Another approach we see on occasion is the team that invests in building an automated solution to this problem. We’ll talk about that next.