Topic 7A Flashcards
Asset management
monitor for unauthorized activity, and identify potential vulnerabilities
ensuring that all devices and systems are appropriately secured, patched, and updated to mitigate the risks of cyberattacks
supports incident response activities, enabling security teams to quickly identify and isolate affected assets during a security incident
An asset management process
tracks all the organization’s critical systems, components, devices, and other objects of value in an inventory.
It also involves collecting and analyzing information about these assets so that personnel can make informed changes or work with assets to achieve business goals.
assignment/accounting
In asset management, processes that ensure each physical and data asset have an identified owner, and are appropriately tagged and classified within an inventory.
Monitoring/asset tracking
Enumeration and inventory processes and software that ensure physical and data assets comply with configuration and performance baselines, and have not been tampered with or suffered other unauthorized access.
Ways to perfrom asset enumeration:
Manual Inventory - manually taking inventory. More feasible in smaller companies. Involves physically inspecting assets, such as computers, servers, and network devices, and recording relevant information, such as serial numbers, make and model, and location.
Network Scanning - Nmap, Nessus, or OpenVAS, can automatically discover and enumerate networked devices, including servers, switches, routers, and workstations. These tools can identify open ports, services, and sometimes OS
Asset Management Software - Lansweeper, ManageEngine, or SolarWinds, can automatically discover, track, and catalog various types of assets, including hardware, software, and licenses. Creates a centralized dashboard
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) - centralized repository of information related to an organization’s IT infrastructure, including assets, configurations, and relationships
Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solutions - For organizations with a significant number of mobile devices, MDM solutions like Microsoft Intune, VMware Workspace ONE, or MobileIron can help enumerate, manage, and secure smartphones
Cloud Asset Discovery - With organizations increasingly adopting cloud services, cloud-native tools, such as AWS Config or Azure Resource Graph, or third-party solutions like CloudAware or CloudCheckr, can help discover and catalog assets deployed in the cloud.
acquisition/procurement
Policies and processes that ensure asset and service purchases and contracts are fully managed, secure, use authorized suppliers/vendors, and meet business goals
RFID tag
Used to identify a device for asset identification. Barcodes are also an option
is a chip programmed with asset data. When in range of a scanner, the chip activates and signals the scanner. The scanner alerts management software to update the device’s location.
standard naming convention
makes the environment more consistent for hardware assets and for digital assets such as accounts and virtual machines.
The naming strategy should allow administrators to identify the type and function of any particular resource or location at any point in the configuration management database (CMDB) or network directory.
Configuration management
ensures that each configurable element within an asset inventory has not diverged from its approved configuration
Change control
The process by which the need for change is recorded and approved.
change management
The process through which changes to the configuration of information systems are implemented as part of the organization’s overall configuration management efforts
Critical capabilities for enterprise backup solutions typically include the following features:
Support for various environments (virtual, physical, and cloud)
Data deduplication and compression to optimize storage space
Instant recovery and replication for quick failover
Ransomware protection and encryption for data security
Granular restore options for individual files, folders, or applications
Reporting, monitoring, and alerting tools for effective management
Integration with popular virtualization platforms, cloud providers, and storage systems
Data deduplication
Instead of storing multiple copies of the same data, deduplication stores a single copy and creates references or pointers to that copy for all other instances.
can be performed at different levels, such as file-level, block-level, or byte-level.
Filesystem snapshots
like those provided by ZFS or Btrfs, capture the state of a file system at a given moment, enabling users to recover accidentally deleted files or restore previous versions of files in case of data corruption.
SAN snapshots
are taken at the block-level storage layer within a storage area network. Examples include snapshots in NetApp or Dell EMC storage systems, which capture the state of the entire storage volume, allowing for rapid recovery of large datasets and applications.
