Axonius goes retro to see and secure all devices
Just 6 months after its seed funding, Axonius today announced the general availability of its Cybersecurity Asset Management Platform to enable customers to see and secure all devices.
With over 100,000 devices already managed at early customers worldwide, today’s announcement marks the official availability of the platform in advance of RSA Conference 2018 held in San Francisco.
“We started this company to solve a very specific, acute problem – fragmentation,” said Dean Sysman, CEO and Co-Founder of Axonius. “If you were to think back to the 1980s or 1990s, cybersecurity was easy. It was a simpler time, and no one could have foreseen the security challenges resulting from the explosion in the number and types of devices we use to work every day. When you think of cybersecurity, you think of incredibly cool, advanced technology like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deception, and Automation. But trends like BYOD, virtualization, containers, and IoT have made it extremely difficult to answer the most fundamental question in cybersecurity: how many devices are in my environment, and are they secure? Our approach is a radically simple one: by leveraging the security and management tools customers already have, we can give a comprehensive view of all devices and let customers take action to secure all devices.”
By integrating with customers’ existing management and security technologies and using an extensible plugin infrastructure to add custom logic, customers are able to get a unified view of all devices – both known and unknown. Starting with the most commonly used management and security products, the Axonius Cybersecurity Asset Management Platform gathers data from identity and authentication solutions, network solutions like NAC, firewalls, vulnerability scanners, and switches, agent-based device management products, security solutions like SIEM, and EDR, and device-specific management products like MDM, IoT, container, and OS-specific products to see all details about devices from all angles.
“The security industry is full of solutions to prevent advanced and sophisticated attacks, but somehow we still lack the basic ability to perform effective asset discovery and identification,” said Adrian Sanabria, Director of Research at Threatcare. “Of all the controls we consider to be ‘the basics’ of information security, asset management is considered the first and most critical. Few of these offer more than a murky view of the IoT landscape and fewer reach beyond the traditional corporate network, into public cloud assets and off-premise devices. Axonius doesn’t attempt to reinvent discovery and interrogation techniques. Instead, it wisely takes advantage of existing systems-of-record and APIs, allowing it to have a rich view into the big picture with minimal effort. This allows Axonius to focus its efforts on the problem of answering the correct questions and presenting the information in a more effective context. More wisely, Axonius avoids competing with most of the aforementioned vendors by enhancing the information they collect, not replacing it.”
“We have several global customers already, and we hear the same three things every time we start a POC,” added Sysman.
Simplicity – Customers don’t want to install yet another agent, and they don’t want a 6-month professional services engagement. Simplicity is the only answer if you are solving complex, time-constrained problems that have evolved over decades. That’s why Axonius built a platform to connect to existing management systems.
Speed – The faster organizations can answer questions about devices and their security, the faster they can act. If customers aren’t able to get value right away, you are wasting their time.
Visibility in context – It’s not enough to answer the questions around the number of devices by just exporting a list of IP addresses. Organizations need to understand the type of device, what software and versions are resident, which systems manage it, and how the device fits into the overall security policy.
Axonius’ goal is to give full visibility into all devices, letting customers then ask interesting questions to take automated action. A common example is finding new devices that should be scanned by a vulnerability assessment tool. Using the Axonius platform, those devices can be discovered automatically and can inform the VA scanner to add the new devices to the next scheduled scan. By connecting the siloed systems together, Axonius can go beyond visibility into control and security.