The Top 8 Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) Tools
Discover the best Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) tools. Explore features such as asset discovery and inventory, integrations, and vulnerability management.
Written by Caitlin Harris
Technical Review by Laura Iannini
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Axonius
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JupiterOne
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Lansweeper
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5.
Noetic Cyber
Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solutions give businesses increased visibility into their attack surface by discovering, classifying, and securing their cyber assets. Cyber assets are data, software, and hardware—including desktops, laptops, mobile devices, and IoT devices—that are connected to your company’s network. By inventorying your assets, a CAASM solution can help you identify which of them are outdated or unpatched and which have misconfiguration or security issues. Some solutions will also map an asset’s relationship with other assets and users. This enables you to identify vulnerabilities in your network, and adjust your security infrastructure to cover them.
To achieve this, CAASM solutions integrate with other IT and security tools such as endpoint security, vulnerability management, patch management, and ticketing tools. They then aggregate data from these feeds—validating security controls, remediating issues, and presenting you with a consolidated, near real-time overview of your entire asset landscape. As well as robust integrations, CAASM solutions should be able to automatically discover and inventory your assets to help reduce the workload of your IT team and minimize visibility gaps caused by human error. They should also enable you to categorize your asset inventory and easily search it to find specific information. Some asset management tools also offer automated remediation workflows to help you keep your hardware and software assets up to date and secure.
In this article, we’ll explore the top Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solutions. We’ll look at features such as asset discovery, integrations, search and discovery functions, and vulnerability management. We’ll give you some background information on the provider and the key features of each solution, as well as the type of customer that they are most suitable for.
ThreatAware
ThreatAware is a leading CAASM platform that provides organisations with complete protection of their cyber assets in real time. Unlike legacy solutions, ThreatAware is agentless, and integrates seamlessly with your security tools via API feeds to continuously validate security controls and ensure they are correctly deployed, functioning, and healthy across all assets. ThreatAware automatically identifies security gaps, shadow IT, and misconfigurations that traditional asset management tools miss.
Key Features:
- Discovers & protects every device by integrating with existing endpoint security tools via API, ensuring complete accuracy in asset health and security posture.
- Automated cyber hygiene monitoring that validates security controls, eliminates blind spots, and ensures compliance with security frameworks.
- Real-time protection status of all cyber assets with automated workflows, direct API monitoring, and fully customizable rules.
- Advanced accuracy engine prevents alert fatigue by ensuring your monitoring systems reflect the real state of your environment—every alert is actionable.
- Chrome Endpoint Lens Extension provides real-time insights into security control health directly from the browser.
- Intelligent dynamic tagging allows instant grouping of assets based on any attribute for granular monitoring and enforcement.
- Automated remediation workflows trigger actions via webhooks, ensuring rapid response when security issues arise.
Expert Insights’ Comments: We recommend ThreatAware for organisations looking to optimize and improve cyber asset accuracy and protection to enterprise levels, without adding complexity. The platform’s real-time monitoring, unmatched precision, and automation-driven remediation make it ideal for enterprises that need to eliminate unknown risks, improve security posture, and streamline compliance. ThreatAware is a powerful tool for IT and Security teams across all industries or technical expertise.
ThreatAware
Axonius
Headquartered in New York, US, Axonius is a cybersecurity company that specializes in cyber asset inventorying and management. Their eponymous platform aggregates asset data from an organization’s existing security stack to provide relevant, up-to-date insights into their SaaS applications. Axonius helps to disclose vulnerabilities and informs decisions to improve the status of a business’ asset security. All the while enabling IT teams to keep on top of remediation by offering a range of automated response processes for apps that aren’t aligned with defined policies.
Axonius Key Features:
- Integrations with security and IT management tools enable an accurate and comprehensive overview of device, SaaS app, and user data
- Collects data from devices with an IP address—including workstations, servers, containers, and IoT devices—and users authenticating to those devices
- Data normalization and deduplication provide a clearer, more navigable asset inventory for easier data analysis
- Query Wizard allows admins to easily search their asset inventory to view asset usage and identify vulnerabilities and non-compliant assets
- Granular remediation policies enable admins to define which actions should automatically trigger when an asset strays from security or compliance policies
Expert Insights’ Comments: Axonius is a leader in the CAASM space. The platform’s wide range of native integrations enables it to provide a comprehensive asset inventory, and its deduplication technology and Query Wizard make that inventory highly navigable. We recommend Axonius as a strong CAASM tool for larger enterprises using lots of SaaS applications looking for clear visibility into their assets, and for a way to streamline the remediation of asset vulnerabilities to alleviate the strain on their IT teams.
Axonius
JupiterOne
JupiterOne is a cybersecurity company based in North Carolina, US. The company specializes in asset and attack surface management, giving organizations clearer visibility of their cloud environments. The JupiterOne platform enables businesses to continuously discover and monitor their assets—including the relationships between those assets—to identify vulnerabilities. The solution will analyze where attacks may come from, so that they can make informed security decisions without draining IT resource.
JupiterOne Key Features:
- Integrates with over 180 security and IT management tools, including AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Collects data from endpoints, devices, IP addresses, user authentications, CSPs, SaaS applications, security controls, and code repositories
- Stores asset and relationship data to deliver insights into how assets work together, and where your most vulnerable network areas are
- Visualizes asset inventory data so IT teams can view asset details at a glance, and quickly identify the blast radius of potential threats
- Consolidates and normalizes asset data to make it more accessible
- Workflow automation enables IT teams to respond efficiently to threats
- Built-in compliance frameworks (including NIST, HIPAA, PCI, and SOC2) make it easier to carry out audits and identify compliance drift
Expert Insights’ Comments: JupiterOne is a robust CAASM tool that makes it easy for larger organizations to manage their assets and the relationships between those assets. The platform’s visual asset inventory provides a clear, comprehensive asset overview, while the robust search functionality, alerting, and compliance mapping make it easy for IT teams to keep on top of security and compliance drift. The platform offers an API-based, agentless deployment, making it straightforward to set up, even in complex environments. Overall, JupiterOne is a strong, enterprise-level CAASM solution that’s particularly well-suited to organizations that must meet strict compliance requirements.
You can find out more about JupiterOne’s platform in Expert Insights’ interview with Erkang Zheng, JupiterOne’s CEO and Co-Founder.
JupiterOne
Lansweeper
Lansweeper is an IT asset management provider based in Belgium, with a US office in Texas. The Lansweeper platform consolidates hardware and software asset data in a central web-based console to help businesses keep on top of security and compliance, without having to manually inventory and inspect all their cyber assets.
Lansweeper Key Features:
- Network discovery, IP scanning, and Credential-free Recognition (CDR) technology enable Lansweeper to detect assets and categorize them according to asset type, manufacturer, model, and operating system
- API-based integrations with CBDM, ITSM, SIEM, and SOAR tools provide a comprehensive overview of all assets, which can be accessed via a single, central interface
- Pre-built and customizable dashboards enable admins to visualize asset data to make it easier to analyze, including identifying vulnerabilities, patch status, compliance status, and software licensing
- Robust reporting functionality enables admins to retrieve and share data (with options to export to Excel, CSV, and PDF) on the health posture of their assets, with Microsoft Power BI integration for further visualization
- Admins can identify and disable shadow IT, unknown, and orphaned assets to mitigate exposure via unmanaged—and therefore unpatched—applications
Expert Insights’ Comments: Lansweeper is a strong IT asset management tool well-suited to a CAASM use case. It enables businesses to continuously discover, classify, and inventory their assets, as well as monitor them for vulnerabilities. The platform’s reporting and visualization functionality are particularly strong, helping to inform data-driven decisions to improve security while eliminating costs by identifying where assets are unused. While Lansweeper doesn’t offer the automated remediation options that some other vendors on this list provide, it does enable admins to carry out certain remediation actions—including remote takeovers, updating software, and running scripts.
Lansweeper
Noetic Cyber
Co-headquartered in Massachusetts, US, and London, UK, Noetic Cyber is a cybersecurity provider that enables businesses to improve their security posture through asset and controls management. Noetic’s platform focuses on enabling businesses to understand the relationships between their cyber assets, so they can foresee and mitigate the spread of potential cyberattacks by assessing vulnerabilities within the wider context of their virtual environment.
Noetic Cyber Key Features:
- API-based integrations with security, IT, and business management tools enable Noetic to aggregate, correlate, and present all asset data via one interface
- Asset data is presented visually in a graph database for accessibility and easy analysis
- Asset relationship mapping helps IT teams identify security coverage gaps, misconfigurations, and policy violations, as well as prioritize remediation based on the effect a successful attack would have on the whole environment
- Automated orchestration and response workflows and bi-directional connectors with security tooling free up IT resource by efficiently remediating common vulnerabilities
Expert Insights’ Comments: The Noetic platform is agentless and comes with a range of pre-built connectors to support popular security technologies, making deployment relatively straightforward. Once deployed, Noetic quickly starts delivering contextualized asset information. Its focus on context and relationships make it particularly strong in identifying the potential blast radius of an attack. We recommend Noetic as a strong CAASM solution for mid-size to larger enterprises looking for greater visibility and control into asset vulnerabilities across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
At Infosecurity Europe 2022, we interviewed Jamie Cowper, VP of Product Marketing at Noetic Cyber, to find out more about their CAASM solution. You can read our interview with Noetic here.
Noetic Cyber
Panaseer
Panaseer is a cybersecurity provider headquartered in Surrey, UK, which specializes in Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM). The Panaseer platform provides businesses with up-to-date insights into their security posture, as well as the option to configure automated remediation workflows. This enables IT teams to improve their cybersecurity by making informed, data-driven decisions, without straining their limited resources.
Panaseer Key Features:
- Integrations with other security tools—including vulnerability and endpoint security solutions—create a single source of truth for asset data, making it more accessible
- Panaseer provides data on both internal- and external-facing assets, as well as assets outside of controls coverage, helping to identify which assets are currently unprotected and vulnerable
- Continuous monitoring of vulnerability controls helps IT teams keep on top of coverage gaps for quick remediation
- Security and compliance reporting contain automated metrics based on business context and risk severity to help prioritize remediation, and streamline auditing processes
- Historical and real-time data is presented in user-friendly dashboards for ease of analysis, and can be searched using queries
Expert Insights’ Comments: Panaseer is a user-friendly CAASM solution that provides detailed insights into the security status of each of your cyber assets. Unlike some other vendors on this list, Panaseer is able to discover external-facing assets, as well as internal. Asset data is presented in intuitive dashboards that are easy to navigate and search, alongside contextual information that makes it easier for IT teams to prioritize remediation efforts. We recommend Panaseer as a strong solution for mid-size to larger organizations looking to map and secure their internal- and external-facing assets via a single interface.
Panaseer
Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management v2.0
Qualys is a cybersecurity company that provides cloud-based security and compliance solutions with a focus on automation and remediation. Headquartered in California, US, Qualys serves over 10,000 customers globally, and is a trusted name in the vulnerability management space. CyberSecurity Asset Management (CSAM) v.2.0 is Qualys’ cyber asset management solution, which inventories, classifies, and monitors internal and external assets to help organizations identify and mitigate vulnerabilities.
Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management v2.0 Key Features:
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB) integrations and credentialed and non-credentialled scanning provide a complete, unified view of all managed and unmanaged software and hardware assets
- Compatible with cloud, on-prem, and distributed hybrid environments
- Asset criticality ratings help IT teams to prioritize remediation efforts by tagging assets with contextual risk data, including real-time misconfiguration and vulnerability information
- Real-time alerting on zero-day vulnerabilities, compromised assets, and network abnormalities
- Automatic remediation workflows, including patch deployment and device quarantine, reduce the strain on IT resource and enable teams to focus on more complex threats
- Integrations with the Qualys Cloud Platform offer endpoint detection and response, vulnerability and patch management, and policy compliance
Expert Insights’ Comments: Qualys’ cyber asset management solution is particularly notable for its remediation capabilities. The platform offers powerful in-built automation capabilities that reduce the strain on IT teams by taking control of repetitive tasks. It also integrates seamlessly with Qualys’ wider cloud security platform for added security and automation options. We recommend Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management as a strong solution for larger enterprises looking to obtain greater visibility over their digital assets, with a focus on robust remediation capabilities.
You can find out more about Qualys’ approach to asset inventorying and vulnerability management in Expert Insights’ interview with Paul Baird, Qualys’ UK Chief Technical Security Officer.
Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management v2.0
VArmour
Headquartered in California, US, VArmour is a cybersecurity provider that specializes in application relationship management. VArmour’s CAASM platform enables businesses to discover all the internal assets on their network and map their relationships in order to better understand their attack surface, and how potential attacks may spread laterally through their environment. The platform can also be used to prevent application communications that aren’t compliant with data protection standards, such as stopping payment gateways from communicating with non-payment related apps.
VArmour Key Features:
- Continuous application asset discovery, categorization, and relationship/dependency mapping gives businesses an up-to-date overview of their attack surface
- Machine learning analysis of application behaviour and user access provides an understanding of operational risk and highlights security and compliance drift
- In-built isolation, segmentation, and application controls enable IT teams to remediate security and compliance vulnerabilities by preventing risky relationships
- Compatible with cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments
- Robust reporting functionality makes it easier to fulfil audit requirements for SOC2, PCI, and HIPPA for public-facing applications
Expert Insights’ Comments: Deployed as-a-Service, VArmour is straightforward to set up and highly scalable. Its application relationship mapping capabilities are particularly strong, making it easy for businesses to identify critical vulnerabilities and the potential blast radius of an attack, as well as identify relationships that are non-compliant. We recommend VArmour to larger organizations, particularly those that must comply with strict compliance requirements, looking to better understand their application attack surface and manage their exposure to cyberthreats.
Expert Insights interviewed Tim Eades, CEO at VArmour, to discover more about their application relationship management platform. You can read our VArmour interview here.
VArmour
Everything You Need To Know About CAASM (FAQs)
What Is CAASM?
Almost two-thirds of organizations say that they have blind spots in their digital environments that hamper their security, yet 24% are still mapping their systems manually. This not only makes managing the attack surface incredibly cumbersome, it also increases the likelihood of a vulnerability being missed.
Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management solutions, more commonly known as “CAASM” solutions, audit an organization’s cyber assets—discovering and classifying them—to provide increased visibility over them. As well as cataloging what is on your network, CAASM tools can log an asset’s relationships with another, its usage, and its security status. For example, they can identify which hardware, software, and cloud assets are outdated or unpatched, and which have encryption issues or misconfigurations. This enables the organization to identify their most vulnerable assets and adjust their security infrastructure as needed to protect them.
To achieve this, CAASM tools offer API-based integrations with a wide range of other IT tools that provide information about business risk, such as endpoint security, vulnerability management patch management, and ticketing tools. The CAASM solution then aggregates the data from these various feeds to provide a comprehensive, consolidated, and near real-time view of the entire IT environment. This eliminates blind spots and enables IT teams to identify where all their data is residing and monitor it continuously, via a single pane of glass.
How Do CAASM Solutions Work?
CAASM solutions integrate with cloud and on-premises internal data sources that collect data on assets such as endpoints, servers, devices, and applications. They then aggregate the data produced by these different feeds and present it in one comprehensive, easy-to-manage overview. This makes it much easier for IT teams to identify security vulnerabilities, and to ensure that all their assets are up to date and patched, without having to manually collect and reconcile asset data themselves.
CAASM solutions usually offer out-of-the-box integrations with widely adopted or popular technologies that will enable them to present a holistic view of an organization’s asset landscape. These tools include:
- Endpoint security tools
- Vulnerability management tools
- Patch management tools
- Asset discovery tools
- IT asset management tools
- Ticketing systems
Some CAASM solutions also enable admins to define internal policies and industry frameworks. These expectations can be compared with an organization’s environment to flag any areas where standards aren’t being met.
What Are The Benefits Of A CAASM Solution?
There are five key benefits to implementing a CAASM solution:
1. Increase visibility: CAASM solutions provide a near real-time, comprehensive view of an organization’s asset inventory and the status of those assets in terms of security and compliance. By ingesting data from multiple internal feeds, CAASM solutions enable businesses to discover and consolidate all their asset data—including data stores, access policies, security controls, and even vulnerability and patch analysis. This also makes it easier for businesses to keep on top of shadow IT—these are systems that are deployed by departments or individuals, rather than centrally, without the approval of the IT department. This can introduce vulnerabilities as these technologies aren’t secured by the IT team. CAASM solutions make it possible to identify shadow IT and remove, or secure and manage these vulnerable systems.
2. Use IT resources more efficiently: It takes an average of 89 person hours to manually collect, process, and analyze the data of a single cyber asset inventory. That’s a lot of time that could be better spent on remediating vulnerabilities in your security posture. With CAASM, this data is collected, aggregated, and deduplicated automatically. This not only saves time and resources, but also mitigates the risk of human error causing mistakes in the asset data collected. Some CAASM tools offer automated workflows for certain remediation actions, such as updating or patching assets. This can also help save IT teams valuable time that could be better spent identifying and managing more complex issues.
3. Improve security: With the increased visibility that CAASM provides, IT and security teams can quickly identify gaps in their assets’ security postures and remediate them. This results in an overall higher baseline security hygiene and posture. You can ensure that all security tools are implemented effectively, and in the most appropriate places.
4. Accelerate incident response: As well as identifying and remediating vulnerabilities, effective CAASM solutions will help IT teams to determine the “blast radius” of a potential attack. This is achieved through understanding the relationships between digital assets and calculating the impact if one of these systems were to be compromised. This intelligence can be used to improve your existing security posture and inform where future security efforts should be focused. This allows organizations to limit the damage caused by a cyberattack.
5. Streamline audits and compliance reporting: The strongest CAASM tools automate the discovery of your cyber assets, as well as offering automated remediation workflows. By aligning these workflows with relevant regulatory framework, you can ensure that your assets are in line with defined policies for security and compliance purposes. By visualizing an organization’s security tool coverage, a CAASM solution can also help you quickly identify any records that might be displaying outdated or missing data. Finally, by automatically collecting this compliance data, a CAASM solution can greatly reduce the time it takes your IT team to complete an audit. This helps you monitor and manage compliance drift across your entire asset landscape.
Does Your Business Need CAASM?
Not every organization will need a CAASM solution. However, they can prove very useful if:
- You’re a large organization or you have a complex environment that comprises a mixture of cloud, on-prem, and hybrid assets
- You find it difficult to compile a comprehensive list of all the assets in your environment—including endpoints, servers, applications, and IoT devices
- You’re using manual processes, such as a shared spreadsheet, to classify and track your assets
- You want to be able to predict—and minimize—the “blast radius” in the event of a security incident
What Features Should You Look For In A CAASM Solution?
All CAASM tools offer a slightly different feature set, but there are some features that every CAASM tool should offer. Here are the key features you should look for when comparing CAASM solutions:
1. Automatic Asset Discovery And Inventory
A strong CAASM solution will automatically discovery and inventory all assets on your network. Some tools will only monitor traditional, managed assets, leaving non-traditional assets—like IoT devices—undiscovered and vulnerable. So, it’s important to check before investing that your chosen solution will monitor all the asset types you have on your network. You should also consider how your organization might scale over the coming years to ensure that new digital infrastructure can be accounted for.
The asset inventory should include information on each asset, including:
- Software/hardware version
- Open ports
- Relationships between assets
- How assets are being used and by whom
This list should be updated in as close to real-time as possible—this is only possible through continuous monitoring of your network and effective integration with existing security tools. This data should also be deduplicated and presented graphically to help you quickly identify security and compliance gaps.
Finally, the inventory should be easy to access and navigate.
2. Wide Range Of Integrations
Integrations are an essential factor in how a CAASM solution can perform. The more integrations a solution offers, the more assets you’ll be able to discover and the more holistic a view you’ll be able to obtain of your environment.
It’s important to make sure that your chosen CAASM tool offers out-of-the-box integrations with the endpoint security, vulnerability management, and patch management tools that you’re already using. This will make it easier to deploy, as well as giving you better visibility.
3. Robust Search Functionality
Once discovered and inventoried, a CAASM solution should categorize your assets to make them easier to search. This could include categories such as asset type or attack vector. You should also be able to customize your inventory according to your organization’s specific needs. If, for example, your primary focus is on securing personally identifiable information (PII), your CAASM solution should allow you to automatically monitor and easily find assets that create, store, or consume PII. The best CAASM solutions also offer strong natural language search functionality that can help you answer questions you may have about your asset inventory and the security posture of your assets. For example, if you search for “mobile devices”, you should be able to see all the data your inventory stores on mobile endpoints.
How Does CAASM Compare To Other Network Security Tools?
There are a lot of existing network security tools on the market, many of which offer features that overlap with CAASM solutions. Let’s take a look at some of their similarities and differences.
CAASM Vs. EASM
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) tools help businesses minimize their attack surface by discovering and monitoring external, internet-facing assets. In doing so, they can help businesses to identify and manage infrastructure-based vulnerabilities across their IT landscape. However, EASM tools don’t give organizations any visibility into what’s happening within their environment.
CAASM tools, on the other hand, use API integrations to consolidate all asset data—they identify internal and external, cloud-based and on-prem assets. This gives organizations a more complete view of their asset landscape.
CAASM Vs. AASM
Like EASM, Application Attack Surface Management (AASM) tools, also known as API Attack Surface Management tools, only offer visibility into part of an organization’s environment: software applications. While this is useful, CAASM solutions enable security teams to have a single, consolidated view of all their assets within the wider context of their digital environment.
CAASM vs. CCM
Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) tools audit the controls in transactional applications, such as financial apps, helping to reduce business loss by identifying when certain controls or processes are underperforming or failing. To do this, CCM aggregates data from a wider range of feeds than CAASM does.
CAASM tools commonly integrate with endpoint security, vulnerability management, and patch management tools. CCM tools offer these integrations, as well as integrating with identity and access management, privileged access management, security awareness training, application security, and cloud security tools.
Written By
Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.
Technical Review
Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.