Asset Inventory

Overview

An Asset Inventory is a maintained record of hardware, software, cloud resources, services, data stores, identities, certificates, APIs, and other assets that require ownership and security management. The control exists to reduce the likelihood and impact of compromise by making assets, identities, software, data, exposures, and control responsibilities visible and governable. It is not merely a procurement list because ephemeral, virtual, externally hosted, open-source, and automatically created resources may create equal or greater exposure. It should be interpreted alongside API Inventory because the concepts can affect the same decision without representing the same control, event, or risk.

The workflow identifies the protected object and owner, evaluates threats and dependencies, applies preventive and detective safeguards, and routes exceptions or failures to accountable teams. Controls should be tested against realistic misuse, version changes, privileged access, third parties, and recovery conditions. In this context, useful records include owner, purpose, environment, location, version, sensitivity, dependencies, internet exposure, lifecycle status, support dates, criticality, and evidence from independent discovery sources.

It should connect the term to Attack Surface Management (ASM) where that relationship changes access, transaction treatment, investigation, communication, or recovery.

Records should preserve scope, ownership, configuration or policy version, changes, approvals, test results, alerts, exceptions, incidents, remediation, and verification that the risk was reduced. Evidence must be protected from alteration and retained according to legal and operational need.

Useful measures include coverage, control effectiveness, unresolved critical findings, remediation age, unauthorized changes, detection time, incident frequency, repeat weaknesses, exception volume, and recovery performance.

The relationship with Certificate Management should be documented where it affects residual risk or control ownership.