Step 3 from the 10 steps to Cyber Security covers asset management, ensuring you know what data and systems you manage, and what business need they support.

Asset management encompasses the way you can establish and maintain the required knowledge of your assets. Over time, systems generally grow organically, and it can be hard to maintain an understanding of all the assets within your environment. Incidents can occur as the result of not fully understanding an environment, whether it is an unpatched service, an exposed cloud storage account or a mis-classified document. Ensuring you know about all of these assets is a fundamental precursor to being able to understand and address the resulting risks. Understanding when your systems will no longer be supported can help you to better plan for upgrades and replacements, to help avoid running vulnerable legacy systems.