Lionbridge powers a strong security program with Axonius

Quickly understanding the environment they’re tasked with protecting is top of mind for most security leaders when transitioning to a new job. For Doug Graham, chief trust officer at Lionbridge, the priority was no different. 

In 2019, Graham took on the responsibility of building a robust security program across Lionbridge. The first step in the process was understanding the assets he was trying to protect, and the coverage and effectiveness of the security controls in place.

“Simply put, if you don't know about an asset, you can't protect it,” Graham said.

But maintaining a current and accurate asset inventory — and getting quick answers to asset-related questions — was turning out to be an “uphill struggle.” Factors like demands for faster provisioning and a rapid move to the cloud were driving further complexity.

“As I looked at the assets we had across the organization, the data was all there in various different systems. If I asked the right person in IT, I could get the right piece of information — but it was a complex process,” Graham said.

Without a centralized tool that could correlate data across all these different sources, the team had to “rely heavily on this institutional knowledge,” he said.

Graham quickly realized that his team needed:

• A simpler, faster, and more effective way of getting enough context to secure assets

• An automated process for accessing asset information

Graham was familiar with the Axonius founders and the technology from a previous company he’d worked at. He quickly brought in the Axonius team to put together a proof of value to see how the platform would address his security team’s challenges. 

Today, Axonius enables Lionbridge to correlate data from 25 different data sources across their on-prem and cloud infrastructure and applications, building a single source of truth for inventory and configuration.

The platform allows the team to get an accurate, up-to-date, machine-level inventory (everything from network devices, servers, workstations, cloud instances, and more) and provides a user-level inventory (different types and classes of users). 

“This allows us to create a set of complex queries, and lets us see things like the coverage of our security controls and how effective they are,” Graham said.

Graham noted that the Axonius team has been “wonderful” throughout the entire process.From helping with deployment, to building queries, navigating the information, understanding the connectors, and where the correlation points are, the Axonius team is very responsive and supportive, he added.

“We rely on Axonius to give us that solid foundation that we can build our more advanced controls on top of,” he said.

Apart from providing context about software and hardware assets, the tool also provides a consolidated inventory for user information. Adding the user context to assets also allows for “marrying the traditional system inventory with a user inventory,” showcasing the interaction of both together, Graham said.

This helps security analysts answer critical incident response questions, like:

• Which devices and users were associated with the alerts?

• Where are the devices located?

• What software is running on the device?

• Which users are associated with the device?

When you start pulling together a lot of that information into a single pane of glass and put that in front of an incident responder, then it makes their time to triage a lot quicker,” Graham said. “Because the information is there, and they don't have to go across multiple areas to get that.”