SecureByDesign-Playbook
Quick Start: Assets and Uses
What are you protecting and why? This might include:
- Valuable physical devices
- Information
- Intangible things like reputation, trust, brand loyalty.
Estimate their value. This is not how much they cost you, but what would be the impact - the cost to you - if they were to be:
- Nicked (stolen, seen or copied)
- Bricked (locked out, destroyed, broken, lost)
- Tricked (changed to mislead you)
Skip ones that are less relevant, and in the first round even those that you don’t understand properly. Be quick, coarse, and rough with your estimates rather than exact and late.
| Asset | Uses | Nicked | Bricked | Tricked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What Thing… | ..is used by who to do what? | If it is stolen then what can someone find out from it? | If you can’t use it, what are you also unable to do? | What false information on it might lead to problems? |
By doing this we not only remind ourselves what is actually important to us, but we can start to score these to compare them, and so prioritise which ones to focus on.
Where possible we should use the same units - eg money - for all the impacts so that we can easily compare them. Sometimes we might want to use other units like ‘time lost’, ‘physical harm’, ‘emotional pain’, and soon.
You can draw up your list on a piece of paper or your favourite editor; we provide an example starter Asset Register. See also this explanation video.
Back to Playbook ● Home Example ● Next: Quick-Start Networks ● Smarter Asset Assessments