Last week at our headquarters in New York, we brought together a group of our customers to talk about the trends they saw in 2023 and how those trends will evolve in 2024. This past year was unlike any other - it came with a unique set of challenges that many believe they will continue to face in the new year. However, our customers remain optimistic and feel confident in their ability to navigate an equally complex year ahead.
Here’s what we learned.
You can’t underestimate the power of basics
Generative AI was 2023’s breakout star. It’s all anyone talked about during RSA Conference, and we saw an explosion in the amount of AI-powered tools available on the market. In 2024, we’ll see even more interest and investment in AI, especially when it comes to its role in helping to increase productivity.
However, even AI can’t beat the power of basics. All of our customers agreed that having an accurate and credible asset inventory is paramount to being able to understand their organization’s actual threat and risk. One customer remarked:
“There’s bound to be a ghost at the back of your closet… gathering an inventory of your assets is the first step toward a better future.”
When you have an accurate understanding of what’s happening across your environment, it becomes easier to identify gaps. Additionally, when your team isn’t spending all of their time trying to compile a manual asset inventory, they can focus on more value-added activities – like, for instance, where AI will make the most impact in your security program.
Cost optimization will continue to be a priority in 2024
We entered 2023 with a lot of anxiety over a potential recession. Numerous industries responded by looking for ways to immediately cut costs, and news of layoffs dominated headlines.
But when looking to save money, sometimes the best place to start is looking at your existing tools and assets to get a deeper understanding about deployment, usage, and ROI. Does your current technology stack serve you well, or do you have any unused or overlapping solutions that could be streamlined?
One customer specifically remarked how valuable Axonius is for saving costs when offboarding employees. Before using Axonius, it was difficult to monitor departing employees’ assets. But now, a user account gets suspended by Axonius if it hasn't been seen in 60 days.
When you have more visibility during offboarding, you can better manage software licenses and SaaS applications. Whether it means recapturing or redistributing a license or eliminating it altogether, some experts estimate that rightsizing software usage can return up to 20% or more on software spend.
Download our ebook, “Cost Optimization: The Consensus IT and Security Priority”, to learn more about how to optimize costs and show ROI.
Proactive security is everyone’s New Year’s resolution
Proactive security has been a topic of interest for years, but we haven’t had the tools to actually achieve a proactive security state until now. Moving from a reactive to a proactive approach requires full visibility into your attack surface, something cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) and SaaS security posture management (SSPM) solutions like Axonius can provide.
When you have full visibility into all of your assets, including devices, identities, software, SaaS applications, vulnerabilities, security controls, and the context between them, then you can move away from having to spend your time addressing current security threats, and instead, focus on reducing the attack surface, and with it, cybersecurity risk.
2024 will be the year we’ll see more organizations attempt to achieve true proactive security, and many of our customers believe Axonius will help them get there. Axonius helps customers understand the full context of all assets in their environment at any given time. As a result, it becomes easier to make decisions that will help your organization navigate risk while minimizing threats.
Axonius is more than an asset management solution
Our customers continue to find unexpected uses for Axonius. One of our customers in attendance last week shared how they initially deployed Axonius to gain a credible asset inventory and to improve their incident response processes. But today, that same customer now uses Axonius for divestiture and system ownership as well.
Thanks to our customer’s creativity in how they use the Axonius Platform, they’ve unearthed new use cases that they didn’t anticipate - and new solutions for their security and IT challenges. When you have a full grasp of your digital infrastructure, it gives you the insight and context needed to solve other problems like renewal and licensing management or expediting patching and remediation processes. Improving asset management is just the beginning. We’d love to hear how you’re using Axonius and what new use cases you’ve uncovered in your organization as well!
