Seeing is Not Enough: Cyber Asset and Attack Surface Management Use Cases

We recently launched our OrdrAI CAASM+ solution, driven by the broad need from our enterprise customers for a platform that unifies asset data for complete visibility and deep context on every asset in their network. CAASM, first defined by Gartner, means “cyber asset and attack surface management,” and is about the increasing need to identify the growing security and management challenges with network connected assets, including devices, users, installed applications, cloud workloads, and SaaS applications.”

With the explosive growth of assets (in both volume and diversity) and the corresponding expansion of the attack surface, both security and IT teams find themselves grappling with numerous challenges: from effectively managing asset inventory to pinpointing risks and exposures and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Recognizing the need for a complete solution to address these pain points, Ordr developed CAASM+ with the belief that merely seeing an organization’s entire asset inventory is not enough. What they truly need is comprehensive, accurate asset visibility coupled with in-depth asset context to tackle critical security and IT use cases head-on. To deliver a CAASM solution that fulfils these use cases, Ordr maintains three fundamental beliefs regarding asset and attack surface management:

1. Completeness Asset Discovery: Discovering and classifying every asset on the network, including IoT and OT, and eliminating blind spots is essential functionality for a CAASM solution. These critical assets comprise about 40% of most networks, and most organizations cannot discover or classify them effectively. High level insights about IoT or OT devices and manufacturers are not enough; details about what software is running, where it’s connected, and what it is doing in the network is important.
2. High Fidelity Asset Data: The days of “more data is better data” are over. What is important is that a security team has high quality data they can rely on for patching, remediation, and incident response. This means automating the process of correlation, normalization, and deduplication (especially for ephemeral devices) to deliver a single source of trusted asset truth.
3. Deep Context and Classification: Finally, a CAASM solution must have granular context and classification to reveal security gaps and vulnerabilities, and prioritize risks based on business impact. Without granular details and classification, organizations can’t align business and technical contexts to build a security strategy that prioritizes their team’s resources on the most critical tasks.

This is what sets CAASM+ apart from other CAASM solutions. Because of our foundation of complete, high-quality, and granular asset data, we provide organizations across all industries with an asset visibility and security solution that solves their most critical asset management use cases. Below we will get into what you can expect from CAASM+ and the top use cases it addresses. In the next several weeks we will publish a series of blogs that dive deeper into each of these so that you can understand why they are important and how Ordr addresses them.

Asset Visibility and Management: Complete and accurate data is foundational for CAASM. By eliminating the need for manual methods and fine-tuning, Ordr CAASM+ provides comprehensive asset oversight with automated inventory capabilities and uncovers hidden gaps in asset management. Ordr addresses critical asset visibility and management challenges that security teams face in their environments such as:

• Automated asset inventory;
• CMDB reconciliation;
• SBOM reporting; and,
• Asset ownership and user insights.

Identify Security Gaps and Coverage Issues: While security teams invest a lot in their security tools each year, determining if their assets are secure and identifying gaps is time-consuming and complex. Ordr CAASM+ simplifies this process by consolidating data from various sources, like vulnerability scanners and endpoint tools, to create a comprehensive cyber asset inventory and then compares tool coverage against this inventory. This improves endpoint security by detecting and addressing endpoint security coverage gaps such as missing EDR and MDM agents. Security teams can use natural language search to easily reveal gaps and continuously monitor for issues like:

• Endpoints missing critical security controls like EDR or MDM;
• Assets banned by the federal government;
• Assets running out-of-date software; and,
• Assets with weak, default, or no passwords.

Vulnerability Prioritization and Management: Identifying and prioritizing critical vulnerabilities puts a heavy burden on security teams. Ordr CAASM+ alleviates this challenge by providing a unified platform for end-to-end vulnerability management, enabling teams to identify, investigate, and prioritize vulnerabilities efficiently. Ordr automatically cross-references data with vulnerability databases, ensuring a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of vulnerabilities across the network. Ordr’s AI/ML mapping and correlation engine and Software Inventory Collector align technical and business priorities, reducing alert fatigue and providing a prioritized list of top risks. Ordr CAASM+ empowers teams to:

• Minimize cyber risk by discovering and understanding the full vulnerability landscape (including IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT).
• Simplify risk prioritization and vulnerability remediation based on asset risk scores tailored to the organization’s risk profile, ensuring that teams can focus on vulnerabilities posing the greatest threat to the business.
• Automate remediation workflows with ITSM workflows that are assigned to the right device owner.

Accelerate Incident Response: Time is critical for incident response teams, and having a centralized asset “database” to analyze incidents is invaluable. Ordr CAASM+ empowers incident response and security teams to act decisively and effectively with complete asset visibility and deep asset context. Sharing this context with SIEM/SOC results in faster and more informed incident response. Ordr CAASM+ also enriches IT tools and incident response data with the most comprehensive, accurate, and trusted insights for all assets to streamline and automate workflows by creating ITSM tickets with ITSM, SIEM, and SOC systems.

Audit and Compliance Reporting: Addressing compliance can be an expensive and time-consuming process, especially because regulations are constantly changing. Ordr’s automated asset inventory and deep asset insights enable teams to easily address and demonstrate compliance for industry and regulatory frameworks with customized dashboard and reports to meet compliance frameworks, including NIST, CIS Controls, Cyber Essentials, DSP Toolkit, CMMC, SOC2, PCI-DSS, and more.

By prioritizing complete asset visibility, high-fidelity data, and deep context, Ordr CAASM+ empowers organizations to address critical asset management challenges, from asset visibility and management, to vulnerability prioritization, incident response, and audit/compliance reporting. Follow along as we explore these benefits and explain how our product effectively addresses each specific use case. If you are ready to learn how CAASM+ can help your organization reduce your attack surface, schedule a personalized demo today.

Monica Armand

Monica is a key member of the Ordr product marketing team, dedicated to linking customers with Ordr products that empower action and diminish asset risk. With prior experience in launching enterprise cybersecurity products across multiple domains—including application security, identity management, and asset management—Monica is deeply committed to introducing innovative technologies that not only solve customer challenges but also facilitate decisive action.