Inventory Before You Harden
Explain why asset and software inventory are the foundation of practical network defense.
Unknown assets are unassigned risk. CIS Controls v8 begins with enterprise asset and software inventory because visibility drives every later control. Patch management, secure configuration, access control, vulnerability response, logging, and incident containment all depend on knowing what exists and who owns it. Inventory is not a single spreadsheet. It is a reconciliation practice. DHCP may show a device that endpoint management misses. Firewall logs may show a service that cloud tags do not describe. Vulnerability scans may discover a host whose owner left the company. The value comes from comparing those signals and treating mismatch as a security finding.…
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