CAASM (Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management)
A security discipline focused on maintaining complete visibility into all cyber assets and their exposures by consolidating data from across the security tool stack into a unified asset inventory.
What is CAASM (Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management)?
A security discipline focused on maintaining complete visibility into all cyber assets and their exposures by consolidating data from across the security tool stack into a unified asset inventory.
Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) is a security discipline — coined and defined by Gartner in 2021 — focused on providing security teams with a comprehensive, continuously updated inventory of all cyber assets and their security exposures. CAASM platforms aggregate data from across the existing security tool stack (EDR, vulnerability scanners, CMDBs, cloud security platforms, network monitoring) and consolidate it into a unified asset view.
The core problem CAASM addresses is asset data fragmentation. Most enterprises have asset information spread across 10–20 different tools: the CMDB has IT assets, the EDR platform has endpoint data, the vulnerability scanner has scanned assets, the cloud security platform has cloud workloads, and network monitoring has network-connected devices. None of these systems is comprehensive on its own, and they rarely agree on what assets exist. CAASM consolidates and reconciles these sources.
For IoT and OT environments, CAASM's aggregation approach has an important limitation: it can only surface assets that at least one of the integrated tools has already discovered. If no integrated tool discovers IoT and OT devices — which is the case for most IT-centric tools — CAASM inherits those blind spots. Comprehensive coverage requires a CAASM approach that includes network-based agentless discovery as a data source, not just aggregation of existing IT tools.
Key Facts
- Gartner introduced the CAASM category in 2021; it has become a core security capability for enterprises
- CAASM platforms that rely solely on tool aggregation inherit coverage gaps from each integrated tool
- The average enterprise has asset data spread across 12+ different security and IT tools
- CAASM combined with network-based agentless discovery provides the most complete asset coverage available
How ORDR Addresses CAASM (Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management)
ORDR functions as a CAASM-aligned platform for connected asset environments, providing the agentless discovery and IoT/OT classification that fills the gaps traditional CAASM aggregation misses. ORDR data can also be federated into broader CAASM platforms via API, enriching their asset view with IoT, OT, and IoMT data they would otherwise not have.
See ORDR in actionFrequently Asked Questions
Complete visibility across your entire attack surface.
ORDR unifies IT, IoT, and OT asset intelligence so your team can see—and act on—what matters most.