Running your own business is not always easy and involves a range of key areas to monitor. From tracking marketing campaigns’ performance to maintaining high customer service levels, business owners have lots to think about every day.
IT also plays a central role in business, making properly managing your IT set-up something that can’t be ignored. One element that is vital to have a handle on is cybersecurity. This is the process of protecting your systems, devices, and networks from malicious attacks by online hackers. Common threats such as ransomware, malware, and phishing must be kept at bay to ensure cybercrime does not negatively impact your company.
Device inventory management is one way to keep your business safe from online crime. It can also help your cybersecurity efforts in some often overlooked ways. But what is it, and how can it help keep your organization safer from cybercriminals?
What is Device Inventory Management?
Device inventory management is simply the process of recording, tracking, and managing a company’s various computing devices. It can cover things such as the secure warehousing of spare devices, shipping devices to new staff, or the logistics of getting work computers back from employees who are leaving.
As the vast majority of firms use devices like this as part of their daily operations, it is something that can be very useful. This is especially true for companies that might have a large number of devices in circulation.
Managing your device inventory is also handy for businesses that employ remote or hybrid working models. Whether mobile devices for field-based staff or laptops people take to work from home, proper management of these assets is key.
What Overlooked Ways Does Device Inventory Management Boost Cybersecurity for Business?
The truth is that managing your device inventory keeps your company’s devices organized, safe, and ready to ship when needed. It also means that you always know what devices your company has in its inventory, where they are, and who’s using them.
As we have already noted, device inventory management can also come with some overlooked benefits for your organization’s cybersecurity efforts. Here are 5 of the best to know about.
1) Tracking Software Updates
By tracking when the software on company devices needs updating, you can get ahead of the game and be ready to install it when needed. This ensures that any business devices always have the latest software installed and avoids staff using older versions of software that emerging cyber threats can exploit.
In the case of anti-virus software specifically, device inventory management can also flag up when subscription plans need renewing and keep devices fully covered from the latest cyber threats online.
2) Proper Disposal of Devices
Although cybersecurity efforts within businesses focus on staying safe online, what happens to devices offline can sometimes have an impact. This is because cybercriminals with direct, physical access to laptops, mobiles, or computers can steal data from them.
If your company is updating some of its older devices, you should never just throw them out and think the job is done. Even if you have deleted data, systems, and software from them, cybercriminals could still access them from the hard drive. Proper disposal of outdated devices is essential, and device inventory management can help with this.
By tracking your company’s fleet of devices, you can keep records of when older ones were disposed of and how. This allows business owners to ensure all devices are disposed of properly and stops hackers from accessing data from poorly disposed-of devices.
3) Detection of unauthorized devices
Keeping an accurate inventory of the devices in your business means you know what devices should be in circulation and who should be using them. It also means you know when devices are accessing your IT infrastructure which are not included in your inventory.
This is a massive bonus for any company’s cybersecurity efforts and can keep you safe from the raft of online threats. Knowing when an unauthorized device is in use means you can monitor what it’s accessing, which device it is and where it’s operating from.
You will usually find a remote employee who prefers to use their laptop or mobile phone to work. By keeping track of these situations, you can nip them in the bud and ensure only fully secure, updated devices are used within your company.
4) Secure Wipe of Devices Before Redeployment
Most businesses without money to burn are unlikely to buy every member of staff they hire a brand-new device to work from. Due to this, most firms will recycle their devices and recover them from staff who leave to use them again.
As with proper disposal of devices, though, it’s never a good idea to simply pass devices on without securely wiping them first. This could leave sensitive data that the new hire is not authorized to see. It also means that any viruses that may have gotten onto the device previously are wiped and stopped from doing any more harm.
5) Compliance Monitoring
IT compliance means that all devices within a company must meet the latest regulations, such as SOC2 and ISO 27001. Remote working, in particular, can present real challenges for compliance within the lifecycle of IT assets.
Therefore, it’s key to manage your device inventory properly to close any compliance vulnerabilities and beef up your cybersecurity efforts. This will help keep devices safer from online threats by ensuring they manage customer data robustly and in a way that hackers can not bypass.
It also means you can track the devices in your workforce to ensure they meet the basic international standards for information security online. This means you can track each device in your business to ensure it meets the latest cybersecurity standards.
Effective Device Inventory Management with Ignition IT
Device inventory management can enhance cybersecurity in a range of sometimes overlooked ways.
Ignition IT offers unrivalled device inventory management services, perfect for beefing up cybersecurity in your business. With over 20 years of IT experience behind us, we work with all kinds of companies to provide superior management of their device inventory.
Contact us today for more details on what our service offers.