Banish Shadow IT With Digital Footprint

It’s out there. In the deep, dark corners of your IT estate, it’s been hiding. Maybe it’s that “killer app” one of the department heads brought back from a trade show. Or maybe it’s that campaign microsite that marketing had a contractor develop for a “skunkworks” launch. Shadow IT is more than an asset management problem. It’s a security problem because you can’t secure what you can’t see. And that challenge ripples throughout your organization, placing downward pressure on your security posture.

Get the Complete Picture

CISO’s and security teams need to discover the entire IT estate so they can comprehensively see the threat landscape. This includes those unmanaged endpoints, apps introduced via USB sticks, and web domains developed in regional offices but not registered with corporate. Most of these examples likely arrived without malicious intent, but need to be included in the digital footprint of your organization all the same.

Explore and Validate

Collecting all the inventory of your digital assets is the foundation. With a complete digital footprint, you’re armed with the information to take action. Reconcile the inventory: what are these previously undiscovered assets? Are they still in use? Should they be updated, discontinued, or globally adopted? There is an IT asset management benefit to this, which may mitigate your risk in future license audits, but your even bigger financial motivation may be making sure these assets are not weighing on your cybersecurity risk rating.

You need to be able to understand the score impact and risk associated with each asset included in your digital footprint. That granularity means being able to query down to the individual IP address or domain of an asset so you can claim it, and also sort inventory lists in ways that help you prioritize actions such as identifying the most critical assets in need of attention.

Validation wouldn’t be complete without the ability to refute, and misattribution could be unnecessarily skewing your score. Many think of the scenario where an incorrectly attributed asset is weighing down your score, but it could equally be the opposite – providing a false sense of confidence if a misattributed asset is influencing your score in the positive direction. Through the same filtering that helped sort IP’s, you need to be able to refute individual IP addresses as incorrectly attributed to your digital footprint. Needless to say, refutation needs to be fast. Waiting weeks or even months for resolution is completely unacceptable.