Supporting IT assets are software, hardware, network infrastructure, people, physical infrastructure such as server rooms, and outsourced services. These include all information technologies, facilities, and third-party services on which your primary assets depend. In other words, if a supporting asset fails, the primary asset will not be available.
- supporting assets are everything that must work for your organization to use its primary assets
- supporting assets are mapped to primary assets
- supporting assets contribute to the security of the information system
Examples of supporting assets
- Payroll processing applications
- Server running enterprise software
- Employee's laptop
- Employee's mobile phone
- Any hardware (printers, network elements, etc.)
- Services (cloud services, electricity supply, air-conditioning etc.)
- Cloud storage
- VPN's
- Access management processes
How to Track Supporting Assets
- You can maintain a catalogue of support assets in Aptien
- To comply with NIS2 you have to keep track of the dependencies between supporting and primary assets
- This is in order to be able to assess what primary assets are affected when a particular supporting asset is unavailable