Navigating Cybersecurity Asset Challenges with CAASM

With the explosive growth of assets (both in volume and diversity) and the corresponding expansion of enterprise attack surface, it’s impossible to do asset inventory management without a modern software solution. Furthermore, with the rising frequency of cybersecurity incidents affecting organizations, it’s imperative that security teams know what assets they own, but also know what’s running on those assets. This includes details like software operating versions, make, model, serial number, connectivity, access and permissions. Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) addresses these challenges by providing comprehensive and accurate visibility, consolidating siloed information, surfacing risks and exposures, and enabling efficient risk remediation and compliance reporting.

As described by Gartner, “CAASM is an emerging technology that is focused on presenting a unified view of cyber assets to an IT and security team. These assets can serve as an attack vector for unauthorized users to gain access to a system to steal information or launch a cyber-attack. To detect assets containing outdated software, misconfigurations, and other vulnerabilities, CAASM tools use API integrations to connect with existing data sources of the organization. These tools then continuously monitor and analyze detected vulnerabilities to drill down the most critical threats to the business and prioritize necessary remediation and mitigation actions for improved cyber security.”

In enterprise environments where asset landscapes are complex and interconnected, CAASM bridges the gap between physical and digital assets with comprehensive, accurate visibility. CAASM solutions address several key use cases for cyber asset and attack surface management, including:

Asset inventory and management: CAASM solutions automate asset data aggregation, eliminating the need for manual methods, enabling teams to uncover hidden gaps in asset management. By aggregating and normalizing asset data, CAASM solutions provide an automated inventory of all assets including devices IT, Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) assets, cloud, applications, SaaS, and users. This includes detailed information about device type, manufacturer, OS version, vulnerabilities.

As described by Gartner, “CAASM is an emerging technology that is focused on presenting a unified view of cyber assets to an IT and security team. These assets can serve as an attack vector for unauthorized users to gain access to a system to steal information or launch a cyber-attack. To detect assets containing outdated software, misconfigurations, and other vulnerabilities, CAASM tools use API integrations to connect with existing data sources of the organization.

CMDB reconciliation: CMDB management is challenging for all organizations and often requires manual data entry leaving organizations with partial, out of date asset records, and missing asset records. CAASM solutions enrich CMDB and other IT tools with comprehensive asset data. This enables teams to

· identify missing assets

· update records with current asset data and status

· and clean up outdated records

Identify security gaps and coverage issues: Organizations manage numerous security tools and invest significantly in them each year. Yet, verifying the security of their assets and pinpointing gaps continues to be a time-consuming and complex process. With comprehensive asset visibility and deep asset context, CAASM solutions can automatically identify security gaps across the network. For instance, surfacing:

· endpoints that are missing critical security controls like EDR or MDM

· assets banned by the federal government

· assets running out-of-date software

· assets with weak passwords

Vulnerability prioritization and management: Identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities can burden security teams. CAASM solutions enable teams to more efficiently identify, investigate, and prioritize vulnerabilities. CAASM solutions also correlate vulnerabilities with assets, which speeds up the patching, prioritization, and remediation processes.

Accelerate incident response: CAASM solutions empower incident response and security teams to act decisively and effectively with complete asset visibility and deep asset context. The asset data enriches IT tools to expedite incident response capabilities.

Audit and compliance reporting: Gathering evidence for audits or to demonstrate adherence to regulatory frameworks can be time-consuming and cumbersome, CAASM solutions automate this process with dashboards and reports to provide the asset details needed to address compliance needs and audits.

CAASM offers numerous benefits, such as optimizing resources through automated asset inventory management. Additionally, by providing vulnerability and risk insights, organizations can minimize their attack surface, enhance operational efficiencies, and streamline compliance assessments.

To meet the requirements of complex enterprise environments, Ordr maintains three fundamental beliefs regarding asset and attack surface management: complete asset discovery, high-fidelity asset data, and deep context and classification. Ordr believes to effectively address the asset management challenges faced by security teams today, CAASM solutions need to go beyond API-reliant methods to capture data for all assets. In Ordr deployments we don’t solely rely on API data aggregation. We also conduct our own asset discovery through the Ordr Discovery Engine and Software Inventory Collector, providing the most comprehensive visibility into every asset on the network, including often overlooked devices such as IoT and OT. We then use AI/ML technology to normalize and deduplicate data, eliminating noise from duplicate assets. This comprehensive approach is what sets Ordr CAASM+ apart from other solutions by:

· Providing complete visibility and detailed context on all assets, including devices, cloud workloads, SaaS, apps, users

· Eliminating blind spots by identifying unmanaged devices, including IoT and OT devices

· Enabling accuracy of asset and attack surface, and prioritization of risks through AI/ML classification and deduplication

· Surfacing security gaps and risks through generative AI-powered search

· Addressing the entire enterprise asset management journey on a single platform, all the way from asset visibility to initiatives such as zero trust segmentation

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To learn how Ordr can guide you through the process of gaining visibility into, understanding, and securing your cyber-asset attack surface, visit ordr.net.