By now, it’s likely that you’ve heard the term “attack surface,” which is the summation of all the possible risk exposures, vulnerabilities, and controls across your organization that result from physical endpoints, software-defined assets, third party or internet facing applications, users, and more.
As businesses shift to the cloud, these attack surfaces grow in size and complexity. Managing them can be a chore that is often left incomplete - not for a lack of trying - because of the sheer size of today’s digital environments.
To combat this, startups and established businesses alike are working towards creating robust Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) tools to help companies manage their threat landscape. Choosing between these CAASM vendors can be a challenge. Read on to explore what to look for when choosing the perfect CAASM vendor for your business.
Elements of Effective CAASM Vendors
CAASM solutions enable your security and IT teams to monitor all your existing point solutions and combine asset data into a single, unified view. This collection of your entire cyber asset universe gives you complete visibility into your internal, external, cloud, and on-premise assets, allows you to query all your data, identify vulnerabilities and gaps as well as their scope, and empowers you to accelerate incident response and remediation.
To be effective, every CAASM solution you evaluate should include the following components:
- Asset inventory: Having a complete asset inventory is the first step to securing your attack surface. CAASM solutions should help you continuously discover and consolidate your asset data across your infrastructure and tooling.
- Comprehensive visibility: With asset inventory comes visibility, but is that enough? CAASM tools allow you to look deeper into your environment and close gaps to achieve improved security hygiene and posture.
- Relational context: CAASM tooling helps you see your cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid environments to understand how your assets connect to each other. This context is crucial to securing each and every entry point and empowers your security team to isolate threats and accelerate incident response.
- Querying capability: Seeing your entire cyber asset universe can be overwhelming, but the ability to query your data helps you get answers to the toughest questions to understand who is responsible for each and every asset you have, where your vulnerabilities lie, what threats you need to be aware of, and more.
- Alerting and automation: With CAASM, you can establish a baseline level of security health for your organization with standards for each asset. Because CAASM continuously monitors your environment for new changes, assets, threats, and vulnerabilities, your team can quickly identify the scope of a threat and fast-track investigation and response.
- Continuous compliance: Most everyone has a compliance framework that they need to adhere to, whether it be by industry standards or customer request. CAASM helps businesses automate evidence collection and analysis of cyber asset data to help you avoid compliance gaps and be alerted in the case of compliance drift.
Cyber Asset Visualization
The best CAASM vendors curate their platform to be user-friendly. Not only do they offer comprehensive dashboards, but certain vendors utilize a graph-based model that enables you to see and track all of your assets and their corresponding relationships, making it easy and intuitive to map all your assets and quickly make logical connections between identities, cloud workloads, git repositories, code commits, and more.
This is particularly useful because attackers often reach your most valuable information through the exploit of a related asset. Having your entire cyber asset universe on a map can help you pinpoint how the attacker gained entry, the scope of your blast radius, and how to isolate your threat to minimize impact.
Risk Assessment and Gap Identification
The best CAASM solutions will help you resolve issues before they even become security problems. Because CAASM, by definition, gives you comprehensive visibility, identifying potential risk and gaps is easier than ever with scalable data normalization and powerful, in-depth querying capabilities.
Plus, automating asset discovery and management with pre-set compliance frameworks aligns your assets to meet your desired level of security and helps you proactively identify and avoid gaps before they happen.
Expertise and Experience
Although CAASM is an emerging technology, it’s important to look for a vendor with expertise and experience, as well as a proven track record with customers who are similar to your size and industry.
Our founding team at JupiterOne has a long history in cybersecurity with experience ranging from security practitioners, all the way to becoming CISOs and CEOs.
Furthermore, while many organizations utilize a graph view, JupiterOne is the first organization to create one on a graph database to deliver higher-quality, more accurate, and up-to-date visualizations.
Finally, good security vendors service good security vendors. JupiterOne provides CAASM capabilities to the best security teams in a variety of industries and sizes.
JupiterOne: Your out-of-this-world CAASM vendor
When searching for your out-of-this-world CAASM vendor, look no further than JupiterOne. JupiterOne can help take the load off of your security team while providing seamless attack surface management. Whether you need a complete solution or just a few use cases, JupiterOne can deliver:
- Comprehensive cyber asset management: You can’t secure what you don’t know you have. Many security teams struggle to sustain complete, continuous security because they are leaving unknown, unmanaged, third party, open-source, or forgotten assets unsecured. Plus, automating compliance and security standards will ensure new assets adhere to your desired level of security. After one hour, JupiterOne gave a customer comprehensive visibility into their cloud environment and delivered continuous and automated management, which resulted in an improved overall security posture.
- Improved cloud security posture: Many traditional security solutions are made for on-premise infrastructure. CAASM was specifically designed to meet the needs of a cloud-based, multi-cloud, or hybrid environment. One people-based marketing provider had a highly dynamic workload that was becoming unwieldy. They turned to JupiterOne’s breadth and depth of integrations to bolster their AWS security, enforce policies, and more.
- Accelerated vulnerability management and incident response: Vulnerability management and incident response teams often get stuck in manual asset mapping and struggle to prioritize the hundreds of alerts tagged as “high priority,” and one prominent financial services organization was experiencing both. With JupiterOne, they achieved collaborative vulnerability management and asset management that normalized their data across disparate tooling, implemented a questions-based approach to security, continuous monitoring, and reporting, and saw a 20x reduction in manual time spent correlating vulnerabilities to a single asset.
- Identity and access governance: With the sheer amount of cyber assets in any modern organization, unknown, unwanted, or forgotten access needs to be managed. One of the biggest identity and access management vendors needed a solution that could help them identify where they’ve unknowingly granted outside entities access to their cloud environments and who has access. After creating queries to analyze all third-party IAM roles, they could see all third-party access and permissions and scalable visibility and understanding of security hygiene across all assets.
- Continuous compliance: Compliance is often evaluated as a point-in-time measurement. But what happens between those two audits? JupiterOne empowered a financial services provider to achieve and maintain continuous compliance for all of their cloud assets. The Head of Security for a fraud-prevention provider for the healthcare industry needed to build his security program to meet stringent compliance requirements without breaking the bank. With JupiterOne, he not only achieved SOC2 compliance in six months, but also became healthcare compliant in 2 months, created a centralized view for the entire DevSecOps team to take action, and automated over 50% of their evidence collection and analysis processes.
Cybersecurity is hard - we won’t lie. The nature of our rapid development and cloud-based technologies make it even more challenging and complex. But when you’re equipped with the right tools that were designed for the right purposes, you’re already ten steps ahead.
To start securing your cyber attack surface with JupiterOne, talk to a team member. Or, get started for free.
