What practice is essential for maintaining asset security?

Maintaining asset security is fundamentally about ensuring that all systems, applications, and data comply with established security standards and policies. Compliance and baseline checks play a crucial role in this process, as they help organizations identify security vulnerabilities and ensure that their assets operate within predefined security parameters.

Regular compliance checks involve assessing whether security measures are abiding by relevant laws, regulations, industry standards, and internal policies. They help organizations detect deviations from established security practices and provide an opportunity for corrective action before those deviations can be exploited by malicious actors. Baseline checks establish a minimum security standard for systems, allowing organizations to maintain a consistent and secure operational environment. This practice supports a proactive approach to security, where organizations can continuously identify weaknesses and make improvements, thereby enhancing overall asset security.

In contrast, the other choices, while important aspects of a comprehensive security strategy, do not solely focus on the oversight and adherence to security standards necessary for maintaining asset security. Active defense strategies focus more on proactive threat response, network traffic security governs the monitoring of data flowing through the network, and data rights management deals specifically with the control and access of data rather than the overall security posture and compliance of assets. Thus, compliance and baseline checks are integral to ensuring that assets remain secure through adherence to security policies