KuppingerCole Analysts AG, a leading research analyst firm focused on the digital landscape and cybersecurity, recently published its Attack Surface Management Leadership Compass report. The report’s authors, Osman Celik and John Talbert, provide their perspective on the market segment and how businesses, non-profits, and government agencies can build or uplevel their attack surface management programs to reduce exposure to cyber threats.
The attack surface management (ASM) market segment is broad and encompasses a variety of technologies and techniques, which can lead to confusion among cybersecurity and IT buyers. In this report, the authors explain their definition of ASM and then review a number of commercially available ASM solutions. Among the companies and products reviewed, Axonius is listed as a leader in each of the report’s four categorizations:
- Overall leadership
- Product leadership
- Innovation leadership
- Market leadership
In further correlated views of the market, Axonius is listed as a:
- Market Champion — a combination of market and product leadership
- Technology Leader — a combination of product and innovation leadership
- “Big One” — a combination of market and innovation leadership
Source: KuppingerCole Attack Surface Management Leadership Compass
Attack surface management report summary
The digital attack surface is a vast and ever-changing entity. The rapid pace of innovation, constant digital transformation, and a growing number of cyber threats challenge organizations in their efforts to understand and protect valuable assets. Complicating matters further is the fact that the attack surface encompasses more than just the assets an organization owns or uses. KuppingerCole analysts describe the attack surface as “the totality of all possible entry points within an organization, as well as the digital infrastructure of its subsidiaries and partners. It includes the hardware, software, storage, networks (on-premises and cloud), and identities (of users, service accounts, and devices) that attackers can exploit to deny service, gain unauthorized access, launch attacks, or compromise sensitive data.”
The report continues to explain why ASM is a crucial element of an organization’s cybersecurity measures and shares the functionalities ASM solutions should include for optimal efficacy. Importantly, the authors note that ASM solutions enable organizations to "identify, analyze, and mitigate potential attack vectors effectively,” and “enumerate vulnerabilities, analyze exposure, and combine business context and risk information in a way that is easier to consume and more actionable than previous methods.”
Source: KuppingerCole Attack Surface Management Leadership Compass
Here at Axonius, our view of ASM is that it must be comprehensive, easy to use, and provide not only actionable insights into the asset landscape, but that it must give our customers options to quickly and practically triage and remediate the most business-impacting vulnerabilities.
Product/vendor evaluation
The evaluation of Axonius begins on page 30 of the 96-page report. In their assessment of Axonius, Celik and Talbert note that Axonius is especially strong when it comes to: Asset discovery and identification, vulnerability monitoring, and architecture and administration.
Source: KuppingerCole Attack Surface Management Leadership Compass
- Impressively long list of pre-built integrations for many IT and security tools.
- SaaS-delivered, plus on-premises components available for asset management.
- Uses internal and many third-party CTI sources.
- Good query interface for analysts.
- Ability to query Microsoft AD or LDAP databases for user inventories.
- Multiple security certifications.
Though this report is extremely thorough and detailed, it should be noted that Axonius has released numerous feature and functionality enhancements since its publishing in September. Notable releases include:
- The launch of the Axonius Platform — the unification of the Axonius Cybersecurity Asset Management and SaaS Management products with a unified back end.
- The release of the Axonius Asset Graph — an interactive visualization that allows customers to dig deeper into asset, asset relationships, and asset dependencies.
- Major updates to Dashboards and Reports.
- Continuous addition of new, pre-configured adapters and Enforcement Center Actions.
All of these updates make it easier for our customers to understand what’s happening in their IT environments, whether it’s identifying what assets there are, the potential risks for shadow IT, cloud misconfigurations, external threats, and other vulnerabilities. Axonius helps teams gain a complete view of their attack surface so that they can better prioritize and reduce risk.
