Six Ways to Gain Business Value with Real-Time IT Asset Management

Stacey King | July 10, 2019
In our previous blog post, we recapped the highlights from a recent Gartner report, Reducing Audit Costs and Risks with a Comprehensive IT Asset Management Strategy. In this blog post we’re exploring the role real-time asset management plays in driving service and cybersecurity innovation and business value.
It seems like only yesterday when real-time IT asset management was a sleepy category of IT asset inventory tracking and configuration management software, but now it’s dominating a lot of agendas in boardrooms and executive offices. Finance, operations, cybersecurity, support and compliance leaders are beginning to realize the role it can play in digital transformation initiatives, risk management, regulatory and software license compliance, and of course, security management and incident response. However, to exploit these opportunities and drive new business services, real-time asset management solutions require specific capabilities, which I’ll describe below.
Find every asset without requiring software agents
Historically, companies have tried to cull information from their collections of point-in-time discovery tools to create a respectable repository, but that can result in incomplete, inaccurate inventories. Why? Collecting and comparing multiple data sources is an extremely time-consuming and arduous manual process that’s prone to errors. And to make matters worse, the resulting point-in-time configuration management database (CMDB) becomes increasingly out of date by the second.
Proper asset management requires agentless discovery, intelligent classification and accurate posture assessment of virtual and physical devices, regardless of whether they are IT systems, operational technologies or Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The Forescout platform provides 100% discovery and classification of all IP-connected devices—regardless of location—without requiring agents or impacting network performance or business operations.
Update the CMDB, continuously monitor systems and share contextual data in real time
Asset information must be populated into a CMDB that can be leveraged across the organization. That’s why these next capabilities are crucial. For optimal results and efficiencies, an IT asset inventory requires accurate situational awareness. In other words, as the status, configurations, security posture and users of systems change, the CMDB must reflect those changes. This up-to-date information must be shared with a variety of services and tools for system patching and maintenance, help desk, security operations and incident response, network access control and more. True workflow orchestration of all of these steps and integration of these tools is where real automation and business value occur.
And that’s where the Forescout platform comes in, providing agentless visibility, continuous monitoring and automated orchestration with ServiceNow®solutions via eyeExtend for ServiceNow.
Six ways the Forescout platform delivers business value with real-time asset management
The Forescout platform provides real-time, accurate asset intelligence across device types, organizational units and functions to:
These are not just theoretical benefits: they are achievable for any organization willing to embrace a real-time access management approach.
In our next blog post, we’ll look at the real-world example of how the state of Utah is achieving many of these benefits by leveraging the Forescout platform’s real-time device intelligence and feeding this insight into ServiceNow to orchestrate asset management workflows. In the meantime, here are additional resources that may interest you:
Click here to watch Sean Convery, VP and GM, Security & Risk Business Unit of ServiceNow discuss how to contextually know and manage connected assets in real time to detect and reduce risk with the ServiceNow-Forescout solution.
Click here to watch the webcast: Fostering Security Innovation with Optimized Asset Insight & Incident Response, presented by Brennen Reynolds, Forescout; Piero DePaoli, ServiceNow; and Bob Bragdon, CSO Magazine.
Click here to learn more about the Forescout and ServiceNow integration and partnership.
1 https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2019/02/how-utah-gained-visibility-devices-its-networks
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