Organizations are transitioning to the cloud faster than ever to keep up with the changing consumer and business climate. According to Gartner, by 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services; this is a huge increase from 20% in 2020. However, as your cloud expands, so does your attack surface. As we shift towards a more cloud-first world, new challenges emerge:
- Increased complexity as you scale to multi-cloud environments
- Multiple point solutions have limited and disparate security coverage
- Difficulty tracking long-term or ephemeral cloud workloads and systems
- Increased risk from new coverage gaps
Whether your business has a 'cloud-first' strategy or not, staying competitive and secure is becoming increasingly important and mission-critical. Achieving this requires a complete and continuous understanding of your entire cloud infrastructure and environment. Some businesses use cloud asset management solutions to identify, manage, and secure every single asset in their cloud deployments.
What is Cloud Asset Management?
Cloud asset management solutions are often a segmented component of cloud security or cloud managed services. Cloud asset management enables you to inventory, track, manage, view, monitor, and analyze all of your cloud infrastructure and related cloud services.
To successfully manage your cloud assets, a few basic but key questions need to be addressed:
- Do you have complete visibility and understanding of your entire cloud infrastructure used across your organization?
- How many cloud assets do you have deployed across your organization?
- Do you actually use the cloud assets that you're paying for?
- What are the potential or critical risks across your cloud infrastructure?
- Is your cloud infrastructure meeting the industry standards and required compliance needs?
- If your cloud assets are impacted by a security incident or event, do you know which assets, users, or business units it may impact across the business?
The Benefits of Cloud Asset Management
An effective cloud asset management solution should address the questions above and more. It should serve as a single source of information across the entirety of your cloud assets that can be continuously and actively monitored, managed, and analyzed. Cloud asset management should also function as an essential tool that can help you assign and communicate actions to relevant stakeholders across your business.
Here are the main benefits of effective and scalable cloud asset management:
1. Cloud Asset Inventory Tracking and Management
Whether you're an AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or a multi-cloud shop, a fundamental advantage of cloud asset management is the ability to gain complete visibility across your entire cloud infrastructure and cloud assets.
2. Cloud Security Assurance
An effective cloud asset management solution strengthens your cloud security strategy. Complete inventory is the first step to keeping track of your entire cloud attack surface and identifying potential risks and threats to your cloud infrastructure.
3. Close [Cloud] Compliance Gaps
Effective cloud asset management solutions can tie into your compliance needs and help you automatically collect evidence across your cloud assets and measure how they adhere to company policies, industry benchmarks, and required regulations.
4. Cost-Optimization of Cloud Assets (and More)
According to one study, respondents self-estimated that their organizations waste 32% of cloud spend. Modern cloud asset management systems can help cloud, infrastructure, and security teams gain immediate access to metadata about your cloud assets. This structural information empowers you to make more informed decisions and optimize where possible in the business. For example, when considering spinning cloud assets up or down, optimize everything from asset management to future budget planning to reduce risks and cut costs.
The JupiterOne CAASM Solution
The great news is, JupiterOne empowers organizations with cloud asset management and takes it to the next level with Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM).
With JupiterOne's CAASM offering you can:
- Connect cloud assets to your entire cyber asset ecosystem. JupiterOne offers complete coverage of all of your cloud assets and more. Our platform levels up traditional cloud asset management and cloud security by centralizing your data and connecting the dots between your cloud assets and the rest of the business (e.g. SaaS apps, users, endpoints, code repos, identity providers, and more) so you can have total and complete understanding of your environment when you have questions, risks, and more.
- Gain deep and detailed structural metadata across cloud assets and more. Knowing what you have isn't enough. You also have to know what to prioritize. With JupiterOne's ability to pull in cloud resource data and its related connections or relationships, you can truly analyze any of your assets and fast-track responses to a security incident or critical risk when it occurs.
- Reduce cloud asset risks with analysis. With a centralized repository, you can easily locate or query your entire environment. JupiterOne's ability to normalize, classify, and query any cyber asset lets you continuously assess and identify any misconfigured, publicly exposed, or even overly permissioned access to resources. Reduce your overall risk and detect compliance drift before anything happens.
- Leverage built-in security workflows and continuous cloud compliance. Use JupiterOne's automated security workflows with intelligent rules and alerting to trigger ticket creation, communications, and actions to discover new issues. You can also use these workflows to maintain continuous compliance with pre-built frameworks and policies like CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2, NIST and more.
Interested in learning more? Check out these resources below:
