Why You Need a Digital Inventory

This article is originally posted by our partner, Reflectiz. Click here to view their original article.

Do you really know what’s going on inside your website?

Your website contains dozens of digital applications. These apps are trusted with functionalizing many different aspects of your website. Whether monetizing, analytics, or even customer interaction, digital applications are integral to your website’s supply chain. The reason for this is that nowadays, developers don’t write all of their code by themselves. They integrate external scripts and frameworks into the existing website’s code.

This situation has its upside and downside. On the one hand, it significantly reduces the production time required to enable your business functionality. On the other hand, you don’t know which apps are implemented on your site, what they are doing, where they are connected, and who controls them.

It means that you don’t REALLY know what’s going on inside your website.

The exponential growth of digital applications ecosystems has created a new type of attack surface. Threat actors can easily exploit this 3rd party application’s blind spot for sensitive data leakages.

On top of that, new standards of privacy protection legislation mean that failing to address privacy violations can be added up to hefty fines. We’re talking about severe damages to your business; Just ask British Airways how ferocious it is.

If you’re a CISO or c-suite leader trusted with information security in your organization – This is your responsibility.

Nobody can keep up the pace in a world where cyber-attacks evolve quicker than the technologies it impacts. However, there’s still much we can do about it. All you need to address the issue adequately is clarity.

Therefore, the most efficient tool in your arsenal is informed decision-making. A smart Digital Inventory will provide you with easy-to-read real-time data that empowers your security team’s ability to address exploitable blind spots and irregularities instantly.

In short: Digital Inventory tells you EXACTLY what’s inside your website.

Why you need a Digital Inventory

Maintain Enterprise Empowerment

Competition coerces digital businesses to scale up accordingly. While organizations use digital applications

to enhance their abilities, CISOs and security team leaders are trusted with (1) keeping high-security standards and (2) adhering to different compliance policies while (3) enabling their enterprise to maximize potential.

A smart digital asset inventory will show you which applications are running on your website, even if tag manager or other tools added them. Additionally, it will elaborate on their function, who controls them, and if they behave suspiciously. That way, you can adequately manage your broad application ecosystem without impairing your enterprise efficiency.

Reduce Attack Surface

Your website dependency on digital applications is one of the main reasons for supply-chain attacks (E.G., web skimming, MageCart, and others) that gained popularity in recent years. Traditional security tools, such as WAF, are insufficient at preventing such sophisticated attacks as they’re based on black-listing known threats. It means that they’ll miss changes in your 3rd party application’s behavior.

Additionally, the 3rd party applications on your website are linked to external domains. When visitors use your site, their browser communicates with these domains to provide needed data and enhance their browsing experience. Since all domains are running from requests generated on the client-side, most changes in them will remain unnoticed and undetected by your web security controls. This creates an appealing opportunity for cybercriminals to conduct silent attacks that can remain undetected for long periods.

You can’t proactively reduce your attack surface without understanding the current status of applications running on your website. A smart digital inventory will eliminate your digital application’s blind spots by continuously monitoring and analyzing your 3rd-party applications, notifying you of any changes and irregularities that might be a security threat in real-time.

Privacy Policy Compliance

Besides the direct damage cyber-attacks may inflict on your business, you also need to address privacy issues. Precedents in consumer privacy protection legislation made the already strict policies even harder. Now, you’re accountable for every privacy violation that happens on your website, and they might stack up to an excruciating fine.

Complying with privacy regulations requires maintaining high-security measurements. Using a digital inventory to map your applications ecosystem for audits and regulatory responsibilities will simplify compliance as it gives you a clear view of your application ecosystem.

Conclusions

Each of these challenges represents a fundamental problem that comes along with the extensive use of digital applications. Each of these requires addressing. But there’s no ‘right’ answer on how to handle these issues. The only sure thing is that the longer you wait, the severity will only increase.

Still, you can significantly reduce the response time and mitigate risks by simply making informed decisions based on real-time data.

The bottom line is that you need a Digital Inventory to:

1. Discover your digital assets by mapping all of your applications to gain complete visibility into your digital applications ecosystem.
2. Analyze your digital applications to validate their integrity and enable your enterprise to scale up while keeping up with high-security standards.
3. Monitor any changes and irregularities that occur in your web applications as close to real-time as possible.
4. Prioritize customizable alerts and notifications based on informed application analysis to reduce your team response time significantly.
5. Enforce your security policy on applications and simplify the responsibilities of privacy regulations and audits processes by exporting comprehensive digital assets reports.

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