Episode Summary

11:11 Systems Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Vince Wood, Lauren Malhoit, and Chris Ray for a conversation about keeping track of the assets, both physical and virtual, that IT companies rely on to conduct business. They discuss the importance of visibility for any business, how to adapt asset management for the world of SaaS, and even integrating ephemeral assets into your management system. Is asset management about counting the number of servers in a rack, or is there more to it?

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[02:50] Can you start by giving us an idea of how asset management data has traditionally been collected and how it is used to secure primarily on premises environments?

Topic 2

[10:50] Now we’re talking about nonphysical assets. We’re talking about software that we don’t own but are more in a rental type approach. (Software as a service is oftentimes something that happens on a monthly [basis]). And once we stop paying, we stop having access to it. So can you help us understand where we need to think differently?

Topic 3

[19:12] Should those temporary assets be tracked and protected in the same way we would our physical on premises assets or our always on cloud assets?

Cloud Bites

[02:41] “When it comes to asset management, [if] you don’t know what you have, it’s going to be really hard to bring it up when the proverbial “you-know-what” hits the fan”  — Vince Wood 

[08:15] “I don’t think the CMDB is really the solution moving forward and trying to apply that endpoint centric solution to an EC2 instance maybe also doesn’t make sense.”  — Chris Ray 

[09:50] “Visibility is great except for if you have to look at 30 different solutions to get all of the information to put it into context. I think that ultimately it’s going to be just a lot of solutions that come together, and however companies choose to make those visible in less than 30 different windows would be how it’s going to have to happen.” — Lauren Malhoit

[13:33] “One of the hardest parts of any job, I think, is not just giving everyone visibility, but providing the context. Without the context, it doesn’t mean much.” — Lauren Malhoit

[16:01] “What happens when work from home enters the picture? What happens when… an employee that takes an asset to another network where there are, say, fewer controls? Does it still function as you expect? Is it still gated the way that you want it to be?” — Vince Wood

[25:54] “I live in the D.R. world, so I am going to keep going back there. But if you don’t know how it was set up and who logged in and did what, when someone ultimately ransomwares you, you’re screwed.” — Vince Wood 

[27:16] “It’s… the nature of the cloud, how it’s kind of democratized all these different services that you would normally need a very specific skill set to create and spin up and make available on the Internet. Now you can click a button [and] that very specific service [is] just kind of hanging out there, and maybe it doesn’t have any sensitive data in it, but it’s going to be a surprise to the security team at some point.” — Chris Ray

[29:41] “ If you’re a customer or individual organization listening to this, please break down the silos between the I.T. department and all the other departments, because we’re talking about asset management, we’re talking about security. And without saying it, we’re actually also talking about data protection. [So] if you don’t have that open line of communication with all the other departments in the business… you just made your job that much harder.” — Vince Wood