The Axonius Cybersecurity Asset Management solution is already chock-full of good things. No other asset management solution provides comparable depth and breadth of asset inventory, asset management, and in-solution policy enforcement capabilities.
But to keep pace with market demand — notably, the ever-increasing enterprise attack surface and the complexity of IT environments — we’ve added several new features to help Axonius customers identify and investigate assets more efficiently and accurately. These features will also more easily manage assets according to security policies and compliance mandates, and remediate vulnerabilities or potential vulnerabilities before they become active exploits.
Version 4.6 Highlights
Vulnerability Management Module
One of the most important aspects of securing an enterprise is the ability to rapidly identify the presence of vulnerabilities across the fleet of deployed assets. However, a stagnant or exhaustive list of vulnerabilities can quickly become overwhelming to investigate — more than 50 new CVEs per day, alone, are received by the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).
Axonius Version 4.6 makes it easy to track and monitor vulnerabilities related to deployed assets, then dig into the details. Current customers will notice the new Vulnerability Management Module will look and feel just like the Devices view, displaying aggregated and correlated data from all fetched adapter sources related to vulnerabilities and affected devices.
The Vulnerability Management Module allows users to connect vulnerabilities to specific devices and software, resulting in better insights, investigations, prioritization, and mitigation.
At a functional level, users can run vulnerability queries against device data. For example, a user could ask Axonius: How many devices are affected by [X] critical vulnerability? Which vulnerable devices are running on open ports? Which devices do not have endpoint protection deployed?
Two levels of querying — at the vulnerability layer, correlated with the device layer — will allow for detailed investigations and help users find and fix any vulnerabilities that could impact the organization.
This new module will include additional vulnerability enrichments directly from the NVD, making vulnerability management even more actionable and informative. Detailed reporting capabilities will allow users to display and share business-critical information about organizational risk, giving business owners the opportunity to make strategic decisions.
Enhanced Vulnerability Visibility allows Axonius customers to:
- Track and monitor new and persistent vulnerabilities across the deployed fleet of assets
- Gain deeper level information associated with vulnerabilities (e.g., attack vector, exploit information)
- Pinpoint risk associated with known vulnerabilities and associated devices
- Prioritize and enforce remediation actions
- Customize reporting based on role and need-to-know to improve business decision-making
Dashboard Enhancements
The key to asset management is the ability to understand assets, asset relationship, changes over time, and trends for individual and grouped assets. One of the best ways to get this understanding is visualization through graphical dashboards.
In this current feature release, Axonius has created a more user-friendly dashboard experience, allowing customers to gain greater visibility into and context of asset-related changes and trends.
Resized charts
Users can now resize all dashboard charts by selecting a size for the chart. This allows users to see the full scope of data presented clearly and with more specificity.
Multiple private dashboards
Users can also now create multiple private dashboards to better customize what they see and how they see it.
Show changes in chart values
To more easily identify and manage asset trends, the 4.6 release enables users to show changes in the values of the charts created with information about assets, and then to compare the results. This provides the ability to see if and what changes have occurred in the environment so that users can then enforce actions, if necessary.
Dynamic colors
Because charts are a main method of visualization, customers asked for better ways to see and analyze the data in their Axonius solution. Customers can now set dynamic coloring of their dashboard charts based on predefined results thresholds. All a user needs to do is toggle on threshold colors and the asset data comes to life.
Timelines
In previous versions, Axonius customers did not have the option to track “field summaries” as the asset environment changed. Customers now can investigate a specified calculated value of a field over a period of time to see anomalies occurring in the environment. For example, customers can look for device versions over time to verify that all devices are running on the latest version, or track a new Windows build to see how the deployment is progressing.
This allows for greater asset investigation and quicker identification of any problems with deployed assets.
Add field filter to query
One of the strengths of Axonius Cybersecurity Asset Management is the Query Wizard. But one thing that was missing from previous versions was the ability to view the query with additional fields so that the customer can further refine the results. In the past, if a customer wanted to see when a device was last seen in their environment in the last 7, 14, or 30 days, they would have to create three separate queries. With the new release, customers can now run one base query and add ad hoc additional fields as a filter, greatly simplifying the process and providing more details, relevant results.
Dashboard enhancements allow Axonius customers to:
- Gain a more user-friendly dashboard experience
- Have greater visibility into and context of asset-related changes and trends
- Better manage their assets and asset-related vulnerabilities
Enhanced Query Management
The ability to search through the proverbial “asset haystack” and find coverage gaps and policy violations is foundational to asset management and thus risk reduction. However, the more searching — or querying — done, the harder it is to track what an individual user or groups of users are doing to find the “needles.”
Axonius has always provided a simple, no-code Query Wizard which customers can use out of the box and without a steep learning curve. The Query Wizard offers many pre-defined queries to help customers start building their own query libraries to help them identify all assets present in their environments, surface security coverage gaps, and enforce actions against risks or policy violations.
Unfortunately, the ease of use has created a long list of suggested and saved queries in customers’ query libraries. A long list of queries was arduous for customers to scroll through, so Axonius updated the look and feel, as well as functionality, of the query library. Customers can now easily organize queries into folders and better manage their queries.
They can create, delete, and rename folders; move queries between folders; build private and shared folders; and select the best folder for their needs when creating a query folder path.
Enhanced Query Management allows Axonius customers to:
- Logically organize queries for better management
- More easily track queries and their use
- Designate a greater number of query types
The Wrap-Up
Version 4.6 comes complete with some very exciting solution enhancements. These new features are just a bit of what’s to come in 2022 and beyond. Our goal is always to facilitate use of the Axonius solution, making it more valuable to our customers and future customers, allowing them to achieve greater effectiveness in their cybersecurity, IT, operations, audit, and compliance programs.
