Not All CAASMs Are Created Equal: How Ordr Is Different

We launched OrdrAI CAASM+ this week. I’m incredibly proud of our CAASM solution; we’ve spent a long time working with both prospects and customers in understanding the market requirements, addressing their specific needs, and developing a solution that addresses the flaws in existing products. We’ve also built on our foundational strengths in solving asset management and security challenges in the most complex verticals. 

First let’s discuss the business reasons, and then the, “What, why, and why Ordr?” questions.

The bottom line business reason for OrdrAI CAASM+ is: with the explosive growth of attack surface volume and diversity, it’s impossible to do asset inventory management without a modern software solution. Furthermore, with the rising frequency of cybersecurity incidents affecting enterprise organizations, it’s imperative that security teams not only identify what assets they own, but also know what’s running on those assets, including software operating versions, access and permissions, and what they are accessing. These insights provide CISOs and security teams with the confidence to maintain compliance, by delivering a prioritized list of vulnerabilities and risks that enable rapid, automated action.  

Introduction to CAASM (Cyber Asset and Attack Surface Management)

Cyber asset management focuses on complete, unified, and accurate visibility of all assets in the enterprise, including users, devices, software applications, installed software, and cloud resources. Attack surface management focuses on identifying vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. We take this a step further by providing asset intelligence that creates deep, accurate context for every single asset. We believe that asset visibility alone falls short in empowering teams to proactively safeguard their attack surface. Comprehensive asset intelligence is essential for teams to proactively surface and fix asset risks and exposures. 

What does that mean? To me, asset intelligence encompasses the following: 

• Accurate, deep context for every asset: this is essential to ensure that you have the most accurate and complete data available for every asset to make effective security decisions. This deep context is essential, for example, with vulnerability management — knowing the software operating system and application details of a particular asset along with the support owner is important to be able to identify if you’re vulnerable and remediate. Accurate and deep context is also the foundation to surface insights on security coverage gaps and compliance violations. 
• Risk-based vulnerability prioritization: this is a critical component of asset intelligence. CAASM prioritizes risks based on business impact and provides a unified view as a single source of truth for surfacing security gaps and vulnerabilities. It serves to simplify evidence gathering for audits, and accelerates incident response should there be a breach. 

Why CAASM? And why is it critical for security teams to invest in CAASM solutions now?

The expansion of attack surfaces from digital transformation is happening in every enterprise, driving two key risk factors:

1. Expanding enterprise boundaries: Digital transformation is causing enterprises to grow beyond traditional borders, encompassing cloud workloads, hybrid workforces, remote offices, and supply chain integration. As the boundaries expand so does the attack surface.
2. Exploding number and types of assets: The volume and diversity of assets—from managed IT, to unmanaged IoT and OT—is skyrocketing. This leads to more significant vulnerabilities, and unmanaged devices also bring with them more unpatched vulnerabilities that lead to an increased threat surface.

All of this is compounded by the massive number of third-party tools we have running. Many of these help us with managing risks and vulnerabilities but they also lead to confusion with different feeds, duplicative asset counts, and disparate sources of data.  

CAASM addresses these challenges by providing comprehensive and accurate visibility, consolidating siloed information, surfacing risks and exposures, and enabling efficient risk remediation and compliance reporting.

Why OrdrAI CAASM+?

We believe we can uniquely address the asset management challenges security teams are struggling to deal with today. In enterprise environments where asset landscapes are complex and interconnected, Ordr CAASM+ bridges the gap between physical and digital assets with comprehensive, accurate visibility. Our offering extends beyond traditional API-reliant methods, capturing data for all assets including often overlooked devices, such as IoT, OT and industrial controllers, and legacy systems. Data and business insights are the foundation of the OrdrAI Asset Intelligence platform, which is grounded in three principles: comprehensiveness, extensive depth of coverage, and trusted and proven accuracy.

The problems we’re solving aren’t new. Ordr has spent a long time analyzing the requirements for CAASM and we’ve worked very closely applying that experience in combination with input from key enterprises to build our CAASM+ product. Here’s how OrdrAI differentiates against other solutions: 

• Comprehensiveness: Ordr’s multidimensional data collection strategy eliminates blind spots by going beyond API-only methods, capturing data from all devices including those which cannot have agents installed, such as IoT and OT devices.

• Depth of Coverage: With a crowdsourced library of millions of assets and AI/ML classification techniques, Ordr provides accurate asset identification, eliminating duplicates and facilitating automated enterprise workflows.

• Accuracy: Ordr’s proprietary data collection method–such as Ordr Software Inventory Collector and mapping engine–empower teams with accurate, real-time asset inventory and insights needed for security practitioners to find and fix risks and exposures.

• Generative AI-Powered Queries: when a cybersecurity issue hits the headlines, or a CISO inquires about a vulnerability (for example, “Are we vulnerable to ScreenConnect or MOVEit?” “Are all my managed endpoints protected with my EDR solution?” “Are there Axis video surveillance cameras in my network?”), how quickly can you answer these questions?  We’ve made it easy with Generative AI-powered queries that do not require learning a new language, or navigating countless reports or dashboards. 

• Expansion to OrdrAI Protect: OrdrAI CAASM+ addresses asset attack surface management challenges. For customers with mission-critical IT, IoT, IoMT, and OT devices, we offer a building block approach to implement OrdrAI Protect for advanced threat and anomaly detection, behavioral intelligence and segmentation capabilities. 

Personally, I am super excited about launching the OrdrAI CAASM+ solution. And we look forward to engaging with enterprise security teams as they deploy OrdrAI CAASM+ and benefit from our class-leading asset intelligence insights.