DCU leverages Axonius to increase asset visibility and improve security control coverage

DCU’s cybersecurity team operates with a core belief: asset management is an integral part of every company’s security framework. As Assistant Manager of Information Security Risk Management Mike Conroy put it, “Our security framework needs the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of all assets to be effective.”

But network visibility can elude even the most dedicated teams. The DCU team was challenged to understand all of their systems since security asset data was being collected and analyzed from multiple, often siloed, systems. The process was slow and tedious.

As a result, DCU’s team lacked insight into potential gaps in its security coverage. “You’d have multiple systems that know something about all your assets, like an antivirus — or at least what you thought was all your assets... It was tough to know whether or not everything was fully protected,” Conroy explained.

Conroy and his team often discovered coverage gaps during routine maintenance, identifying assets not managed or tracked by any of DCU’s multiple software programs.

Frustration grew around two central issues:

1. Lack of confidence in available data, particularly around security solution coverage
2. Continual discovery of assets lacking protection, often outside of normal policy, procedures, or management systems

When the global pandemic hit in early 2020, DCU’s workforce went fully remote. Suddenly, the team faced new challenges: with many assets now offsite, it became even harder to gain visibility into scattered devices.

Within a few months, DCU began the search for an asset management system.

Their criteria for a solution were simple — a platform that could:

• Integrate all of their data sources
• Consolidate that information and make it easily searchable

So when a DCU team member heard about Axonius on a podcast, the DCU team quickly scheduled an overview and a trial — then put together a business case. For Conroy, the case was clear. “We have all these different sources. They don’t reconcile very easily. We can’t do it manually. It’s too much data. But this product takes all that information and does it for you with minimal overhead.”

By implementing Axonius — a platform designed for cybersecurity asset management — the DCU team was able to swiftly integrate its IT and security systems and view them in one central, searchable console.

In fact, the vast majority of DCU’s security tech stack already had pre-built integrations in the Axonius adapter library. The Axonius team responded quickly to any requests for new programs and added them to the library.

The dashboard enabled unprecedented visibility and analysis with the confidence that any data used was being pulled from all of DCU’s systems and across its environment. DCU’s team soon gained a thorough understanding of their complete asset inventory, coverage gaps, and more.

Axonius then enabled the team to turn this data into concrete action, from enforcing policies to ensuring all assets were covered by security solutions, such as endpoint protection and vulnerability management solutions.