If you already have sixteen or more cybersecurity technologies in your stack, you probably don’t want to add another one. With CAASM, you give your people the technology that helps them create end-to-end risk-based processes across IT operations, security, and leadership teams. With this closed feedback loop, you can:

  • Define risk precisely

  • Implement robust controls

  • Create efficient processes

  • Establish cross-functional communication

  • Iterate security and compliance programs effectively

1) Asset Discovery and Inventory

To protect digital assets, you need an automated solution that discovers and inventories everything within your IT environment. CAASM identifies and inventories an organization’s:

  • Workstations

  • Databases

  • Infrastructure

  • Web applications

  • Network devices

  • Cybersecurity tools, like SIEMs

  • Mobile, IoT, and OT devices

Since a CAASM uses passive monitoring, it doesn’t create a service-outage risk so you can incorporate fragile technologies like OT into your asset inventory. You can categorize your assets by type, including:

  • Email server

  • Security product

  • Authentication tool

  • Database

2) Data Discovery and Classification

CAASMs can also provide visibility into where sensitive data resides in your system by understanding the connections between your assets. Typically, organizations tag sensitive data stored on servers. A CAASM ingests the data about these servers, then compares it to other assets looking for:

  • Who uses them

  • How they use them

  • What they connect to

By comparing servers with tagged sensitive data to those without tagged data, the similarities between them enable you to discover previously uncategorized sensitive information. 

3) Risk Analysis

Nearly every compliance mandate and every security program focuses on an organization’s risk profile. Every company’s environment is unique, which is why no “one size fits all” security approach. With CAASM, you connect the dots between business operations and security by aggregating and correlating data about:

  • Assets

  • Sensitive data

  • Resource use

  • Users

  • Vulnerabilities 

  • Connected assets

Using this context, you can define your critical assets, “crown jewels,” for a more accurate risk analysis. 

4) Data Protection

Once you define your critical assets, you can implement better data protection controls. CAASM gives you real-time monitoring across all your assets, from an internal and external viewpoint, so that you can mitigate data breach risks more effectively. Since CAASM provides visualizations, you can see potential attack paths arising from connected and adjacent assets to close security gaps more effectively. 

5) Vulnerability and Configuration Management

Vulnerability management and IT operations teams struggle with the volume of new vulnerabilities reported every year. More specifically, they often have no way to prioritize vulnerabilities based on how likely and easily a threat actor can use them in an attack. In response, they treat all assets with a critical vulnerability as equally important when that may not be necessary in their unique environment. 

Since CAASM correlates business impact, attack paths, and assets, teams responsible for applying security patches can focus on mitigating risks more efficiently, focusing on high impact assets. 

6) Incident Response

By providing visibility into all digital assets, CAASM improves key metrics like mean time to investigate and mean time to respond. Incident response teams have visibility into unpatched assets that threat actors used during an attack and all adjacent assets. This helps them limit the blast radius and trace potential attack paths more efficiently during their investigations. 

7) Compliance

Since CAASM aggregates logs and supplies feedback, you can use it to document security activities like:

  • Applying security patches

  • Updating cloud and app configurations

  • Maintaining up-to-date inventories

  • Removing excess user access

CAASM tools provide easy-to-read reports so that CISOs can communicate risk mitigation activities with senior leadership teams and boards of directors.

8) Resource Allocation

Once leadership teams have visibility into business impact risk, they can pinpoint places where they need more resources. By doing this, they can optimize their technology and staffing investments.  

8 Ways CAASM Enhances Security