Tangible asset

A tangible asset is one with a physical form: servers, laptops, mobile devices, network equipment, storage media, printed records and facilities. The ISC2 exam outline gives tangible and intangible assets as the examples under asset inventory in 2.3. Tangible assets can usually be counted, tagged and located, and they carry a purchase cost and a replacement cost that make them comparatively straightforward to value.

The contrast is with intangible assets such as data, intellectual property, software licences and reputation, which have no physical form and are harder to value. The two are linked: a laptop can be worth far less than the data stored on it, which is why a lost device is commonly handled as a possible data incident. Tangible assets are tracked in the asset inventory, often within a configuration management database, each with an asset owner, and their life ends in decommissioning and media sanitisation before disposal. Their replacement cost also gives a direct figure for asset value when calculating single loss expectancy.

Exam relevance: a scenario is likely to ask which assets belong in an inventory or how a loss should be valued. Candidates are expected to tell tangible from intangible assets, and to remember that when hardware holds sensitive data, the hardware is often not the most valuable part of the loss.