Asset Inventory Best Practices to Build Resilience and Security

Managing your asset inventory is crucial to maintaining a strong information security posture. As your company grows, staying on top of asset management is vital. This ensures you meet the requirements of frameworks like ISO 27001, NIS2, and DORA. In this guide, I’ll share actionable best practices to help you organize your asset inventory and align it with your security and compliance goals.

Whether you’re refining your existing approach or starting fresh, these tips will help you improve your asset management strategy.

Collaborate across teams to improve asset inventory accuracy

It is important to note that creating a comprehensive asset inventory is not a task that can be completed by the information security manager alone. Effective asset discovery needs contributions from multiple departments. The information security manager must coordinate the process, ensuring key stakeholders are involved.

Cross-team collaboration is crucial for building an accurate asset inventory. It requires planning, coordination, and clear roles.

Collaboration doesn’t need to be formal or rigid. Asset discovery can be efficient, straightforward, and adapted to your organization’s culture. The key is to keep it simple and ensure everyone knows what’s expected.

Map assets to business processes for better prioritisation

To protect your business, understand how your assets support core functions. While having a complete asset inventory is a great start, mapping those assets to your business processes is even more valuable. By linking assets to the operations they support, your inventory becomes a powerful tool for prioritizing resources, managing risks, and responding quickly when necessary.

Establish clear ownership to ensure accountability and control

Assigning clear ownership and custodianship is key to an effective asset management system. Ownership involves assigning responsibility for the security, usage, and lifecycle of each asset. Custodianship is the daily management of those assets, ensuring they are properly maintained and secure.

Why is this so important? Without clear ownership, security gaps appear, and assets fall through the cracks. If everyone is responsible, no one is accountable, which leads to confusion and neglected assets. By assigning specific responsibility for each asset—from laptops to critical data systems—you can ensure that nothing gets overlooked.

Clear ownership drives accountability, ensuring assets remain protected, are regularly updated, and are properly decommissioned when they reach the end of their lifecycle.

Schedule regular reviews of the asset inventory to keep your security controls relevant to actual business needs

Once you’ve built your asset inventory, the real challenge begins: keeping it accurate and up-to-date. An outdated or incomplete inventory can leave your organization exposed to risks. Asset management is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process that evolves as your organization’s operations, technology, and environment change.

The goal is to ensure regular reviews of all assets, ensuring that every detail is up to date. Review cycles should focus on objectives like identifying shadow IT or verifying that decommissioned assets have been fully removed from systems.

Link Assets, Risks, and Controls to Strengthen Security and Mitigate Threats

Understanding how your assets are connected to risks—and the controls designed to mitigate those risks—is crucial for strengthening your security posture. By linking assets directly to identified risks, and then to the appropriate security controls, you create a more cohesive, proactive security strategy. This ensures that each asset has the right protection in place, reducing exposure to threats and improving your ability to respond quickly to incidents.

This approach helps you prioritize resources based on risk, making it easier to identify assets that need more immediate attention and which controls need updates. Continuously monitoring the connection between assets, risks, and controls helps ensure your security measures stay relevant and effective over time.

Conclusion: Ensuring Ongoing Security with Effective Asset Inventory Management

To wrap it up, effective asset inventory management is crucial for strengthening your security posture and ensuring compliance with frameworks like ISO 27001, NIS2, and DORA. By following these best practices, you can maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date asset inventory, while mitigating risks and protecting your business. Kordon’s GRC platform helps streamline asset management by connecting assets to risks and controls, making it easier to track and manage your assets’ security status. With powerful features like task automation, clear ownership tracking, and integrated risk management, Kordon supports you in keeping your asset inventory aligned with your security and compliance goals, all within one intuitive platform.