An asset, in its general sense, is any piece of data, hardware, software or other component of an SME that has value. For example, an employee’s workstation, laptop or company smartphone would be considered an asset. Applications and software which runs on these devices also qualify as assets. The same is true for infrastructure (critical or not), such as servers, network infrastructure and support systems, including Cloud and SaaS-provided services.
SMEs’ most common and often at-risk assets are informational ones. These include personal data (sensitive or not) which may reside in Cloud or on-premises databases as well as in physical (e.g., paper) files. For example, files on employees, customers, a newsletter subscription list, medical records, sales records, customer profiles kept in an online shop database etc.
Further information is provided in the following ENISA material:
Source: ENISA