July 14, 2021, marked the advent of a new term: Cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM). Gartner announced its arrival in the Hype Cycle for Network Security 2021.
“What’s CAASM?” you ask.
CAASM is an emerging technology focused on enabling security teams to solve persistent asset visibility and vulnerability challenges, according to Gartner. It enables organizations to see all assets (both internal and external) through API integrations with existing tools, query against the consolidated data, identify the scope of vulnerabilities and gaps in security controls, and remediate issues.
That’s much like our own definition of cybersecurity asset management: The process of gathering asset data (with a primary focus on devices, cloud instances, and users) to strengthen core security functions, including detection and response, vulnerability management, cloud security, incident response, and continuous control monitoring.
What’s Driving CAASM Adoption?
As IT complexity rises, visibility across diverse types of assets requires an approach that automatically and continuously discovers assets in your environment.
That’s where cybersecurity asset management or cyber asset attack surface management comes into play.
Whether you prefer CAASM or cybersecurity asset management, in both cases we’re focused on solving the asset visibility, vulnerability, configuration, and security controls management challenges.
There are several benefits driving CAASM adoption, but let’s look at the five common reasons cited by Axonius customers:
- Comprehensive visibility: By connecting to hundreds of security and management solutions that know about assets, organizations are able to finally get a single system of record for all infrastructure.
- Ability to query across all data sources: CAASM solutions give organizations the ability to ask questions that span all data sources.
- Fewer manual audits and compliance reporting: With a comprehensive inventory of all assets, combined with queries to understand how assets either adhere to or deviate from policy expectations, organizations can save queries to automatically meet audit requirements and map to regulations.
- Collaboration using the same source of truth: Integrating data from multiple sources into a single consolidated view allows IT and security teams to operate from the same set of normalized data.
- Ability to change tools without breaking everything: Having a CAASM solution that allows for adding, removing, and replacing any number of solutions while still supporting each data source allows for the same visibility, query functionality, and response actions — regardless of the solutions customers have in place.
What’s more, CAASM solutions like Axonius objectively show business value by calculating the value of automating manual work and realizing the value of investments.
To help you navigate the new world of CAASM, our latest ebook “From Asset Management to Asset Intelligence: Crossing the CAASM ” takes a deep dive into:
- The history behind CAASM
- Why CAASM is a relevant category
- The impact of CAASM on cybersecurity, IT, and infrastructure initiatives (with a spotlight on common use cases supported by CAASM solutions like Axonius)
- How organizations can realize CAASM’s value — immediately
