As we dive into 2024, Axonius continues to push the boundaries of what’s typically considered Cybersecurity Asset Management (CAM) and SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM). To advance our platform and give customers everything they need to manage their digital estates, our product development team is continuously rolling out new features and functionality.
With our latest release, Axonius 6.1, customers can now take advantage of the new capabilities described below. In total (and even individually), these features make identifying, tracking, and remediating asset-related issues easier and more actionable, providing even greater simplicity and precision to attack surface management and cyber risk management.
We invite you to read this update, contact us, and visit our Documentation page to see more information about all product and platform releases.
Software Management Module
What it is:
The Axonius Software Management Module allows customers to inventory and manage all installed software across their IT ecosystem, from all sources and across all devices and device types.
The following features are now available for customer use:
- Software approval list: Axonius customers can use the “software approval list” to maintain and manage an accurate inventory of all software in use across the organization, regardless of approval state. Every piece of software is or can be marked “approved” or “not approved,” helping IT, risk, and security teams understand what software is being used in their networking environments and identify and/or remove software that is not approved or presents a risk to the organization. Importantly, users now have the ability to mark software as “approved” or “not approved” even before it is detected on the Software page of the platform.
Source: Axonius, Software Approval List
- Axonius Software Catalog: The Axonius Software Catalog provides data enrichment for certain software present in the organization's environment, helping users gain more insight into the state of installed software. With the 6.1 release, Axonius customers can now track and manage software:
- By name
- By vendor
- By category
- By end-of-life/end-of-support status
- Preferred software name and vendor: Since software “name” and “vendor” are aggregated from various data sources and devices, it is likely that the naming conventions will hold multiple values. To reduce the number of naming conventions, and create a single record within Axonius, we’ve introduced "preferred software name" and "preferred software vendor" that uses proprietary logic that results in a single source of truth for each instance of software.
- Software usage: This feature allows Axonius customers to see when software was last used, per the providing adapter, and by which devices and user accounts.
- Version count field: This feature enables customers to identify software versions in their environment and manage older versions so that they can be patched, updated, or removed, if they present a risk.
Source: Axonius, Software Versions List
How it helps:
The newly released functionality in the Software Management Module brings together all the data users need to manage software assets across fleets of devices, and triage any software-related problems from one management plane. This allows customers to easily dig into software usage, access, version, and related vulnerabilities, and helps reduce management fatigue while increasing the ability to identify software risks more quickly and accurately.
Asset Graph
What it is:
The Axonius Asset Graph, released in late 2023, is a visual and interactive representation of the connections (or relationships) between assets in an asset inventory. Axonius customers can use the asset graph to view details of an asset or fleet of assets, run queries about the asset(s), and then expand and filter on the results.
Asset graph offers many benefits, including the ability for Axonius customers to quickly understand network topology, conduct in-depth analysis of assets, and speed up investigations.
With the 6.1 release, the asset graph now offers:
- Custom relationships: Custom relationships allow users to individually define connections between assets. This means that users can now align the data about each asset with the business, IT, or security use case most appropriate for the organization. To create a new custom relationship, all users have to do is click into the “new assets relationship” table and enter the information.
Source: Axonius, Create a new asset relationship
- Templates — save and load: Any actions performed in the asset graph can now be saved and loaded at a later time so that a user can continue an investigation. This enables users to preserve work, resume their investigation, and share their graphs with others while being aligned with the roles and permission restrictions.
- Asset Graph Manager: The Asset Graph Manager helps customers manage all saved graphs in one place. Graphs can be organized into folders, marked as “favorite,” queried, and edited. The graph manager is an enhancement that allows graphs to be accessed more easily and efficiently than before, and can help operators easily get started on new asset investigations.
- Additional layouts: Axonius customers can now choose between organic or hierarchical representations for personalized data visualization. Layouts can be tailored to match the logic of the node relationships, thereby optimizing clarity and understanding. This enhances user control, improves visual representation, and boosts data comprehension by offering flexible graph layouts catering to individual preferences and specific use cases.
How it helps:
New features and functionality within the Axonius asset graph enhance our customers’ abilities to identify, track, and triage assets and their relationships. This is tremendously beneficial when customers need to simplify complex asset relationships and understand the totality of their cyber asset attack surface. In doing so, customers gain the ability to respond faster to issues and improve IT and security workflow efficiency.
SaaS Management
What it is:
- Clickable “user count” fields: More than 15 new fields were added to the SaaS Management Module. Users can click the “managed users” number inside the SaaS applications page to reveal additional information, including associated admins, operational users, suspended users, total accounts, license costs, and more.
Source: Axonius, New "user count" fields added to SaaS Management
- Associated licenses field: A new “associated licenses” field displays all SaaS application licenses associated with a user, providing an easy way to identify all usage across the environment.
How it helps:
In total, the SaaS Management enhancements allow customers to understand the complex relationships between users and SaaS apps and SaaS apps with one another. New enrichment fields give customers more tools to easily track what SaaS apps are in use, by whom, and whether the number of licenses bought and allocated are appropriate.
In addition, the new features improve vulnerability management by detailing user access, trends, and behavior in relation to apps usage.
Case Management
What it is:
Case management was added in the Axonius 6.1 release to allow our customers to identify, track, and manage all “cases” — actions or decisions that need to be addressed by users — related to asset triage. The case management page provides a centralized summary of all information related to all cases saved in the Axonius portal, and can be accessed from the main menu.
Source: Axonius, Case Management
How it helps:
Case management provides the ability for users to create, assign and track assignments as cases, then monitor progress, and include additional information such as priority, type, assignee, due date, description, linked enforcement sets and queries.
This feature helps Axonius users better manage actions and decisions that need to be made about the asset environment, asset-related risk, and business risk.
Query Management — Cross-asset Queries
What it is:
Cross-asset queries were introduced with Axonius 6.1 to enable our customers to run a query between related assets, based on relationships identified in the environment and displayed in the customer’s asset graph and/or as defined by the custom relationships built.
For example, Axonius customers may now query “all devices used by users who are Axonius employees.”
Source: Axonius, build cross-asset queries, starting with "devices."
How it helps:
Cross-asset queries allow deeper visibility into the asset environment and related assets and make more informed asset management decisions.
More on each of these features can be seen in the video below:
