Streamlining Asset Identification For Effective Risk Management

In short, stay high level where possible.  Your goal, through the risk assessment, is to identify and then manage your risks in terms of confidentially, integrity and availability (CIA).  If you start with an asset list pages long, perhaps by taking an extract from your IT department’s configuration management database (CMDB), your results are going to be pages long.  With this level of detail, you will find yourself spending a significant amount of time trying to consolidate risks into a manageable number.  You can always go into additional detail where an asset has a different CIA value.  For example, if you have laptops which store, process or transmit information, you need to include these in your assessment.  However, you do not need to include every make and model in your assessment or even group laptops by every department; they should instead be grouped by the levels of information they have access to.  So ‘Laptops’ could be used to cover most staff members’ laptops, as they all have access to the same level of information.  You can then create a separate group for ‘Sensitive Laptops’, i.e., laptops that are used by your senior management team or HR, as these laptops will typically have a higher level of access to information.

By grouping these assets, you reduce the number of duplicated results in your risk assessment and get a more detailed and manageable representation of risk.  Also, if the controls are likely to be deployed consistently across all assets, then there may be no benefit to splitting assets into subcategories.  For example, if all laptops are encrypted and have similar endpoint controls (e.g. antivirus, firewalling), then grouping the assets in one will be appropriate.

So, consider what that asset ultimately holds or has access to, and approach your asset granularity with that in mind!