Cybersecurity is all about cyber assets, attack surface management, and understanding cyber asset context. When companies are hacked, be it through their software, cloud workloads, code repositories, ephemeral devices, identities, and more – they are all potential points of entry for attackers.
Increased adoption of API-first, cloud-first, and digital transformation helps companies accelerate the delivery of new business initiatives and experiences for customers. Additionally, the persistence of remote work enhances business continuity, workforce flexibility, and employee satisfaction. But these benefits come at a cost. The “cyber asset” universe continues to expand as we progress with cloud and digital transformation to keep businesses moving faster. The more cyber assets an organization has in its environment, the harder it becomes to understand the complete context, as well as the full scope and impact of an attack or breach. Now more than ever, having an attack surface management strategy is vital to security. But where does one begin to find an effective attack surface management platform?
Enter Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM).
Read on to learn:
- What is Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)?
- Why is CAASM Important?
- The benefits, value, and example use cases of a CAASM solution
- The most important features to look for in a CAASM solution
- Differences between CAASM and other solutions
- Additional CAASM resources
What is Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)?
Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) empowers security teams to overcome asset visibility and exposure challenges (Gartner). This technology enables your security and IT teams to see all of your assets (internal and external), query consolidated asset data, identify scope of vulnerabilities, and see gaps in security controls. The scope of “assets” captured by CAASM is broad, including a wide range of resources such as devices, endpoints, servers, software applications, cloud workloads, code repositories, users, and access permissions, providing a comprehensive view across the entire digital ecosystem.
CAASM technology provides security and IT teams with the ability to:
- Gain complete visibility across all their assets (both internal and external, cloud and on-premise) via API integrations with their existing tools
- Query their deduplicated, consolidated data
- Identify the scope of exposures and gaps in security controls
- Accelerate incident response and mitigate issues
Why is CAASM Important?
The simple reason is that the world has changed. Today, it’s difficult for IT, security, and engineering teams to answer even the most basic questions about their complex environments, attack surface, and cyber assets.
- How many known and unknown cyber assets does my organization have?
- What are my most critical cyber assets (People, Data, Devices, Networks, Infrastructure, Applications, etc.)?
- What is the blast radius for vulnerable users, cloud workloads, or endpoints?
- What accounts are in my AWS organization and which accounts are vulnerable?
- Does my organization have any suspicious code commits and git behavior in Bitbucket and GitHub pull requests (PRs)?
- And more…
How do you secure what you can’t see or don’t know you have? What is your cybersecurity hygiene and risk posture today?
Context across your entire infrastructure and cyber assets is the new frontier of cybersecurity.
Understanding your entire cyber asset landscape and the relationships across your security posture is nearly impossible due to the broad span of siloed tools and sheer volume of asset data. A complete understanding of all cyber assets and their relationships puts the context to build a rock-solid cyber security program within reach.
Cloud adoption, digital transformation, and API-first architecture have fundamentally changed how we build, manage, and secure the enterprise. Enterprises use specialized infrastructure and security tools, each of which has its own definition of “asset”. It’s difficult to secure or even know what assets you have across your teams and organization.
CAASM Benefits
CAASM empowers security teams to enhance their security hygiene by identifying gaps in controls and exposures across the entire digital environment. By deploying CAASM, organizations reduce reliance on homegrown systems and manual data collection, improving staff efficiency and reducing the attack surface. With streamlined workflows—manual or automated—teams can quickly address identified gaps. CAASM also enhances visibility into security tool coverage, supports effective attack surface management (ASM) processes, and ensures systems of record remain accurate and up-to-date, minimizing risks associated with stale or incomplete data.
Benefits of a Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solution include:
- Gain a unified, continuous view of your organization’s complete asset inventory by consolidating and enriching data from multiple systems. Inventorying assets remains a challenge for 83% of organizations, demonstrating the critical need for tools that can bridge this visibility gap.(1)
- Enhance decision-making by mapping asset dependencies, providing critical context for accurately classifying asset importance and prioritizing risk mitigation efforts.
- See a centralized view into all of your software-defined assets. Assets are more than just devices with IP addresses. They are operational entities – code repos, data stores, IAM policies and roles, security controls, people, vulnerability findings and more.
- Eliminate time-consuming manual processes and complex integration builds traditionally required to consolidate and analyze asset data—freeing your team to focus on strategic security priorities.
- Streamline compliance and security validation by providing real-time evidence of technical controls’ existence and effectiveness. Quickly answer critical questions about regulatory compliance or custom standards—ensuring controls meet requirements and function properly—without the time-intensive burden of manual processes or workflows.
- Accelerate detection and response across security operations. An effective unified CAASM platform helps you and your team quickly determine the blast radius for any attack surface and fast-track investigation and response with the ability to visually explore your security architecture or query for actionable context instantly.
- Monitor your asset compliance through automated security enforcement. Automation is a natural requirement as teams scale. It’s no different in security. An advanced CAASM tool automates the discovery and management of cyber assets and aligns them with required security policies.
- Continuously monitor compliance drift across all cyber assets. Whether you have no security program, a distributed security team model, or a mature security organization, CAASM helps organizations automate the collection and analysis of cyber asset data helping you avoid any compliance gaps and security issues.
How CAASM Helps Manage Emerging Risks in 2025
Use Cases for CAASM in Modern Enterprises:
Did you know?
CIRCIA (Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act) in the US and the NIS2 Directive (Network and Information Systems Directive 2) in the EU, mark significant advancements in cybersecurity regulation, emphasizing the need for asset visibility. NIS2 broadens the scope of sectors and organizations required to implement cybersecurity measures and report incidents, while CIRCIA mandates timely reporting of cyber incidents for critical infrastructure entities. Both regulations underscore the importance of comprehensive cyber asset management, as organizations must not only ensure compliance but also demonstrate real-time awareness of their cyber environments. A Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solution is pivotal in meeting these requirements, enabling organizations to inventory and monitor all assets, identify vulnerabilities, and ensure alignment with regulatory frameworks. By leveraging CAASM, businesses can achieve the visibility and contextual insights needed to proactively manage compliance and mitigate risks in an increasingly regulated landscape.
What are the most important features of a CAASM solution?
A dynamic solution that continuously monitors all cyber assets by integrating existing tools—no agent necessary. Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) platform correlates data at scale and provides querying capabilities to find potential security gaps and compliance drift.
An effective unified CAASM solution helps you map your assets and asset relationships on a graph-based system allowing you to ask any question of your asset collection. You can quickly make logical connections between identities, cloud workloads, git repositories, code commits, and much more. This relationship context makes it possible to ask extremely complex questions and get answers within seconds.
CAASM is the knowledge base for your entire security posture and enables you to quickly and automatically analyze complex attack surfaces. The more asset metadata you have, the more connections you can understand and govern across your cyber asset environment.
JupiterOne connects all your integrations and cyber asset data into one platform.
The ability to query your cyber assets is critical to understanding the blast radius of an impacted asset and accelerate SecOp detection and response.
What is the difference between CAASM and CSPM solutions?
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) has grown beyond tools like Dome9, DivvyCloud, and Prisma Cloud to include infrastructure and workload scanners that claim CSPM capabilities. But, the CSPM ecosystem has not evolved to keep pace with the complex requirements of cloud-native organizations. Too often, CSPM offers a standard set of misconfiguration checks without depth, flexibility, or even visibility into the monitoring rules. CSPMs are generally a black box with extremely limited capabilities to understand compliance with configuration baselines. Sadly, the same old misconfiguration checks come out of every CSPM offering with no depth or flexibility to modify the monitoring rules. How can we monitor user defined configuration baselines? There are many configs that are unique to our cloud environment. How can we monitor more than just basic property checks such as the relationships between assets?
What is the difference between CAASM and EASM solutions?
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solutions like Cortex Xpanse and CyCognito are most commonly used to discover unknown external-facing assets and networks. They identify infrastructure-based vulnerabilities for an organization’s security operations program. The problem with an EASM tool is that it can’t tell you what’s actually inside your environment today.
CAASM solutions like JupiterOne augment current EASM tooling and existing external asset data by consolidating all data to give teams complete visibility across all their assets (both internal and external, cloud and on-premise) via API integrations. The combined structural data across all cyber assets gives companies the complete context they need to accelerate their security operations.
How can CAASM complement other technologies like SIEM, SOAR, XDR, and Vulnerability Management?
Modern cybersecurity is built on knowledge of your infrastructure and cyber assets. Knowing what exists, where it exists, and all pertinent meta-data around each asset makes it possible to create an effective security program on top of that knowledge.
CAASM solutions like JupiterOne integrate with and connect your assets beyond the cloud into a powerful knowledge graph. The more data you connect, the more you can see and understand across your cyber asset universe. Having queryable access to an up-to-date cyber asset knowledge base is complementary to watching all of the events as they go into and out of the infrastructure. While most tools focus on the events of the system, CAASM tools focus on detecting issues and changes that occur within the assets themselves.
Predicting What’s Next for CAASM?
As the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve, CAASM solutions are set to deliver innovations and advancements that align with the unique needs of CISOs and their organizations. Future capabilities will feature highly customizable dashboards, rule sets, and risk assessments tailored to specific industries, organizational sizes, and geographic regions, enabling leaders to make more precise, data-driven decisions. Regulatory and internal compliance will be a core feature of CAASM platforms that integrate automation to align seamlessly with frameworks such as NIST, ISO, and GDPR, reducing the effort required for manual reporting and the creation of continuous control processes. In addition, CAASM will broaden its capabilities to include IoT, OT, and edge devices, effectively mitigating the risks associated with these expanding attack surfaces.
Interested in learning more about Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management? Check out the resources below or contact us today.
Additional CAASM Resources and Related Blogs
- Why Your Business Needs Cloud Asset Management
- CAASM and IAM to Strengthen Your Security Posture
- Better Together: CMDB + CSPM = Cloud Native Cyber Asset Management
- An American Financial Services Company achieves actionability across vulnerabilities and assets with JupiterOne
- What You Need to Know from Gartner Innovation Insight: Attack Surface Management
