How Axonius Secured New South Wales Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure’s Plans to Integrate New Technology

In an era of rapid digital transformation, government agencies face the challenge of balancing innovation with robust cybersecurity measures.

The New South Wales Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure (NSW DPHI) found itself at this crossroads as it embraced new technologies to improve efficiency in areas such as land use decisions. However, this technological leap brought with it unforeseen complications in asset visibility and security policy enforcement.

Enter Axonius, a cybersecurity asset intelligence platform. The partnership between NSW DPHI and Axonius has since become a testament to the power of comprehensive asset intelligence in strengthening an organisation’s security posture.

“Axonius provided us with a cybersecurity asset management platform that helped us aggregate, normalise and correlate data from various sources, giving us a complete and always up-to-date asset inventory,” says Bianca Wirth, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at NSW DPHI and person responsible for the security of the department.

The impact of Axonius on NSW DPHI’s operations became particularly evident during the department’s Cyber Security Uplift Program.

“We were able to deploy Axonius successfully across our desktop environment, which allowed us to establish a detailed view of devices, users, and cloud instances, significantly enhancing our asset visibility and management capabilities,” Bianca elaborates.

By doing so, NSW DPHI was able to identify “far more applications than we thought existed.” This discovery led to a series of improvements in the department’s IT infrastructure.

“This has been instrumental in uncovering security gaps and automating remediation actions.”

“We utilised this information to consolidate our desktop standard operating environment by identifying non-SOE devices, applications that needed to be packaged and deployed, and verifying that we had captured new devices logging into the network at regular intervals,” Bianca explains.

By partnering with Axonius, the department was able to streamline security operations and improve its overall security posture.

Equally, the platform’s real-time insights and automated security policy enforcement capabilities empowered NSW DPHI to take a more proactive stance in addressing vulnerabilities and ensuring compliance.

Looking to the future, NSW DPHI plans to strengthen its partnerships with Axonius and expand use cases across the Security and IT domains. “We plan to continue leveraging Axonius to support our long-term goals of maintaining a secure and resilient digital infrastructure,” Bianca states. “We aim to further integrate the platform into our security ecosystem, utilising its capabilities to drive continuous improvement in our cybersecurity strategies and operations.”

The NSW DPHI case study demonstrates how Axonius’s comprehensive asset intelligence solution can transform an organisation’s cybersecurity landscape. By providing clear visibility into all assets, automating security processes, and enabling proactive risk management, Axonius has helped NSW DPHI navigate the complex terrain of modern cybersecurity challenges.

As government agencies continue to digitise and innovate, the need for robust cybersecurity asset intelligence becomes increasingly critical. The partnership between NSW DPHI and Axonius, however, can serve as a model for how organisations can leverage advanced technologies to support their core mission and objectives while keeping everything secure.