Agents have become a cornerstone of security programs. But even when an agent is present, it doesn't mean it's working properly, leading to security gaps or misconfigurations -- and leaving organizations challenged with identifying missing or malfunctioning agents. As security environments increase in complexity, it's critical for security and IT teams to know exactly where their agents are deployed and where they are broken or disabled to fix problems before they become security incidents.
We've outlined three unique use cases that exhibit the importance of agent coverage and the significant business impacts that occur when agent coverage is unknown, or misconfigurations are not addressed.
Business impact: Preventing insider threats
While it's no secret that the complexities of a massive corporate security landscape can be challenging to navigate – a large enterprise with dealings in real estate, retail, and insurance learned this lesson the hard way. When the organization suddenly had a key individual leave the company, it soon discovered a hole in its security coverage and offboarding practices. While the organization had invested a substantial amount of money into a data leak prevention (DLP) solution, the organization never deactivated the old user – allowing the separated individual to still access, steal, and leak valuable organizational data from nearly every company level.
Without a doubt, all eyes turned towards the CISO to determine where the error occurred. However, without a solution that could provide an accurate view of where the user permissions weren’t rescinded, the DLP was not able to flag the data leak. But almost immediately after deploying Axonius, the CISO was able to easily identify users, review the excessive permissions, and anomalies in activity, to fully understand where the security gap existed and why the DLP solution didn’t catch the data leak.
Business impact: Protect your reputation
As CISOs understand, showing a cybersecurity program's success is critical to ensuring the value of your expertise – especially after making a massive investment in new technology. For a CISO that had spent millions of dollars on an endpoint protection solution, reporting on the success of the investment was a challenge after realizing he was unsure about the solution rollout and where it had been actually deployed. With the questions and doubts from the CIO mounting and the CISO's reputation at risk, quick action had to be taken to instill confidence.
Leveraging Axonius, the CISO was able to gain immediate insight into where its XDR agents were deployed and confidently report on the success of such a costly investment.
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Example of how the Axonius Query Wizard can find which devices do not have an endpoint protection solution deployed (SentinelOne).
Business impact: Saving time and money
Prior to onboarding Axonius, two different organizations in two separate scenarios had to navigate the challenges of manually identifying where agents were deployed to either upgrade software or pull reports to identify security gaps. With each organization spending about 30 days trying to gather information from incomplete CMDBs, they were investing too much money and time on manual and low-value processes attempting to complete their tasks – a sure lesson in understanding how to optimize costs – hard and soft – and automate where you can.
After onboarding Axonius, both organizations were able to quickly get a comprehensive view of agent coverage, understand where their agents were installed, if they were working properly, and automatically initiate workflows to reinstall, upgrade, or reconfigure– saving time, effort, and costs along the way.
With so many agent-based tools deployed, organizations need a way to automatically and accurately identify all agents and blind spots. Choosing Axonius makes it easy to understand agent coverage, close security gaps, and securely keep operations running.
