CAASM (cyber asset attack surface management) provides a single source of truth, eliminating reliance on homegrown systems and manual collection processes to provide an accurate, up-to-date view of the organization’s attack surface. This enables IT and security teams to collaborate on core security use cases, such as eliminating coverage gaps and prioritizing vulnerability.
Increased Visibility
An effective CAASM solution provides a unified view of an organization’s cyber assets. This helps teams examine and consistently rectify security control and vulnerability gaps. This visibility is critical in overcoming the challenges that shadow assets create. Shadow assets are hardware or software employees add to their systems without IT knowledge. These tools can be the entry point for attackers. By identifying and managing these risks, CAASM solutions help to reduce an organization’s attack surface. By integrating data from API integrations, network scans, and existing asset inventory systems, CAASM solutions provide security teams with an extensive and up-to-date view of their infrastructure. This gives them the contextual information they need to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their criticality and impact. The result is an improved security posture and enhanced security hygiene.
Enhanced Security
With the advent of new technologies like cloud systems, IoT, and API communication, it is crucial to have multidimensional attack surface management. CAASM provides security teams with comprehensive visibility to monitor their entire system infrastructure, helping reduce blindspots that hackers can take advantage of.
Scalability and customization are important features to consider when evaluating different CAASM solutions. It’s essential that the solution can adapt to your organization’s growth and evolving asset base, allowing for easy additions of new assets and data sources. Additionally, a good CAASM solution will have automated processes to streamline and accelerate continuous data collection to improve security posture. Identifying and assessing vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis also helps prioritize security measures based on business impact. This helps ensure the most critical assets are properly protected with an effective and efficient defense.
Increased Efficiency
Modern cyber security tools are effective but limited by what they can see. CAASM helps bridge these gaps, providing unified visibility into your organization’s attack surface.
Using CAASM solutions, organizations can gain a complete picture of their technology assets, making it easier to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk. This helps reduce the time and effort needed to maintain a comprehensive attack surface management program. In addition, CAASM can help to eliminate the threat of shadow assets, which can often go undetected by traditional security tools. These are applications and hardware installed or updated by employees without IT’s knowledge or approval, potentially introducing new entry points into the organization’s network.
Enhanced Compliance
CAASM enables organizations to make data-driven decisions to reduce risk exposure and improve cybersecurity hygiene. An automated asset inventory and vulnerability management process provides a clear view of the organization’s attack surface, enabling security teams to identify and remediate vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.
By utilizing an integrated approach to security, CAASM can be used to improve the effectiveness of other tools and technologies in a business’s security ecosystem. This can help prevent security control failures that open businesses to attack and lead to data breaches, financial losses, or loss of personal information. With an effective CAASM program, businesses can achieve improved cyber-resilience and productivity. This is achieved by reducing the time it takes to identify and deploy assets, reducing the time attackers have to target them.
Increased Resilience
Enterprise attack surfaces have grown with the proliferation of cyber-physical systems, IoT devices, cloud applications, and complex digital supply chains. As a result, securing these assets requires new monitoring, detection, and response approaches. CAASM solutions provide the visibility and automation needed to manage these new challenges. This allows security teams to reduce their externally exposed attack surface, improve security hygiene and enhance cyber resilience.
To do this, they need accurate and complete cyber asset data. This information must be instantly accessible to security teams to isolate and remediate impacted assets. Traditional inventory tools cannot do this; creating inventories is manual and time-consuming, and they don’t automatically update when an asset changes.
