Everyday, Axonius is helping customers reduce complexity across their technology environment. Today, as part of our release of Axonius 5.0, we’re announcing the availability of the Axonius Software Management add-on to our Cybersecurity Asset Management solution, which delivers extensive visibility into software applications. It helps IT and security and risk teams identify software across the technology estate so they can uncover unauthorized software, inform software spend and cost optimization, and reduce risk.
Why Software Management?
A reliable software inventory is at the heart of every security framework. Whether you’re trying to meet CIS Control 2 guidelines — or you’re preparing for a vendor audit — knowing what you have is the first step.
While there are many solutions today that help with inventorying software, we hear firsthand from many teams that they lack a reliable, automated software inventory. More so, many software inventories are driven from one or two sources — not a wealth of correlated data sources.
Axonius has been providing customers with rich software information derived from many of our adapters. However, up until now, software has only been visible through the lens of a device.
Now, Axonius customers can gain a view into all unique software applications in their environment.
Our approach
Axonius Software Management lets customers automatically identify and inventory software applications. It eliminates manual, intermittent software assessments that are outdated the moment they’re completed.
From a single, unified view, Axonius Software Management offers extensive visibility into the presence of software, including deep device context around each software application. The new software management page has the familiar look and feel as our other Devices, Users, or Vulnerability Management pages. Customers see a full distribution of all software in their technology estate, as well as the devices running each application.
Axonius aggregates and correlates software data from numerous sources, such as EDR/EPP, endpoint management, vulnerability assessment, and existing ITSM tools to deliver an inventory of unique software applications — all without having to install an additional agent or scan networks. Custom tagging enables users to categorize software applications for easier analyzing, tracking, and reporting, while correlated data from multiple sources delivers a high-fidelity software inventory that customers trust.
Extensive software visibility enables users to discover all known and unknown software applications in their environment.
Cost optimization
Software managers are increasingly being asked to become performance centers, not just expense centers. Optimizing software spend can yield big returns by eliminating unused licenses and rightsizing renewals and purchases. But how can software managers optimize spend until they know what’s present?
Axonius Software Management reveals all software in the environment — cloud, physical, or virtual devices, so managers fully understand what exists. With that information, users can better manage licenses by recapturing and redistributing them during offboarding, or use the device counts to compare software deployment counts to existing contracts to determine under- or over-utilization, and renew only what they need. Some experts estimate that rightsizing software usage can return up to 20% or more on software spend.
Risk reduction
Most company’s underestimate their level of risk — but it exists, in ways and places that can surprise even the most savvy of threat hunters among us.
Axonius Software Management gives users the tools they need to understand their software landscape and surface those risks. It identifies unauthorized, unwanted, or suspicious software, like social media platforms or games. Software Management can make it easy to uncover end-of-support or end-of-life software that no longer provides updates or patches, and puts your environment at risk.
Axonius Software Management sheds light on the presence of software vulnerabilities to uncover the impact on critical devices, such as servers or other key infrastructure.
For those who prefer to measure progress against a defined risk score, Axonius has custom data fields that can be created to calculate custom risk scores that incorporate your unique criteria, and help to further prioritize vulnerabilities and security gaps.
Enforcement actions
Like any asset, just knowing about the existence of software isn’t enough. Contextual device data can help investigate and inform decisions for how software should be managed and secured. Axonius Software Management includes a multi-level Query Wizard to investigate software applications and associated devices to better understand relationships between them.
Security teams can identify unwanted or unauthorized software applications appearing on unsecure devices, and notify asset owners to take action per company policies.
Simple, internal email notifications asking the responsible party to address an issue can be automated. Initiating remediation workflows with third-party platforms can also be automated to create a ticket, issue, or incident.
Understand the state of your software applications today
Customers can contact their account team to try Axonius Software Management and better understand software applications across all devices. If you’re new to Axonius, start today with a 30-day trial and gain a better understanding of your software applications.
