When we talk to people about Axonius for the first time, we often hear this: “Your platform is a Swiss Army knife of sorts.”
We’ve even heard, “Your platform is kind of like a platypus (“the Swiss Army knife of animals”) for IT and Security teams.”
And that’s true — it is.
Our platform touches a variety of different use cases across roles ranging from IT administration, to SOC analysts, and even pentesters. This has its benefits and drawbacks.
The main drawback? We don’t fit perfectly in any one category — yet.
What’s that mean? It could be harder for people to find Axonius.
The benefit is that once customers get up and running with Axonius, they quickly realize other departments and functional areas benefit from the platform too. (A common example is once security professionals purchase Axonius, their IT department quickly becomes users on the platform, too.)
Using Axonius for IT Risk Management
First off — who’s responsible for managing an asset inventory?
Often, it’s the IT department — with security as a stakeholder. This means there can be overlap in workflows between IT and Security users on the Axonius platform.
Yet, there are some use cases that are most commonly performed by IT professionals on the Axonius platform.
These include things like getting an up-to-date and continuous asset inventory, ensuring business continuity, and mapping asset inventory to compliance frameworks and industry benchmarks.
1. Gathering an Asset Inventory
Axonius helps IT professionals gain a credible, always up-to-date asset inventory.
IT Teams — more than any other department — already have a good idea of all the various solutions used across a company.
Since Axonius simply connects to the tools customers already using to create an asset inventory, it’s possible to get a complete rundown of all unique assets within hours, not days and months. This inventory aggregates risk-related IT operations data.
When certain adapters are connected in Axonius, customers can get a detailed look into each asset. They can see installed software and agent versions, hard drive capacity and utilization, operating system versions, and more.
Armed with this data, it takes only seconds to gather a list of assets that have common IT risks, like:
- Legacy technology: Machines running unsupported operating systems
- Availability risk: Whether certain assets have experienced significant downtime
- Security vulnerabilities and IT hygiene: Understand if machines are running outdated software (such as browsers), and if users are properly using IAM solutions
2. Apply and Verify Risk Controls
After identifying risk, Axonius makes it possible to automatically implement risk controls.
Using any saved query as a trigger in the Axonius Security Policy Enforcement Center, IT pros can set enforcement actions.
This could be:
- Deploying software: Deploying software directly on windows devices using WMI or through the command line interface
- Isolating the machine: If certain endpoint agents are installed, devices at risk can be isolated from the network
- Updating scan coverage: Adding certain IP addresses to be included within scope of the next scheduled vulnerability scan
- Updating and maintaining CMDBs: Add newly found devices to CMDBs or update existing ones
3. Map Asset Inventories to Compliance Frameworks
IT professionals can also use Axonius to understand regulatory risk and how assets adhere or deviate from industry benchmarks.
Out of the box, Axonius currently maps cloud instances to the CIS benchmarks for AWS (with all other major cloud providers coming soon).
Customers can also create custom dashboards pertinent to specific regulations or audit requirements using queries.
