How to Choose a CAASM Vendor

Business operations increasingly rely on cloud applications and connected systems and so the need for modern security measures has never been greater. Your business’s ever-evolving attack surface constantly faces sophisticated and complex threat vectors.

Understanding your organization’s attack surface is becoming increasingly important, especially in the age of digital transformation and hybrid work environments. The potential points of entry that attackers use to gain access and launch attacks is changing — digital asset proliferation and unstructured data continually increases your organization’s overall cyber risk.

A holistic combination of attack surface management (leveraging people, processes, and technology to manage and mitigate risk), attack surface strategy (the process you rely on to understand your business’s relevant use cases), and attack surface assessment (tools used to help rank and prioritize use cases) ensures that your attack surface is addressed through a comprehensive approach.

Legacy technologies were designed to address specific and often siloed threats. Traditional security stacks used technologies that required specific skillsets to operate and understand. A modern security stack considers the organization’s overall attack surface in a cohesive and efficient way.

Attack surface management (ASM) addresses the overall attack surface through three lenses: internal assets focus (cyber asset attack surface management, or CAASM), enterprise brand protection and compliance (digital risk protection services, or DRPS), and external assets focus (external attack surface management, or EASM).

Of these three pillars, CAASM offers some internal and external overlap. Depending on your business’s use cases, CAASM offers an ideal starting point as it addresses shared use cases across ASM pillars include asset management, remediation prioritization, data loss prevention strategy, and asset and data discovery.

CAASM proposes to fix a challenge that many businesses face: gaining and maintaining full visibility into all assets used by the business — and through a single pane of glass. At a granular level, every asset, whether hardware, software, or cloud-based is as valuable as the data it contains. In today’s hybrid and digitally reliant world, every asset collects, shares, and stores sensitive structured and unstructured data types that elevate cyber risk.

Depending on your business’s size, your data protection requirements will vary. If your organization is small (up to 500 employees), CAASM solutions like the Cavelo platform can tick the security box and help you strengthen your overall security posture with alignment to best practice frameworks and vulnerability scanning.

If your organization is larger (500+ employees), CAASM solutions like the Cavelo platform can help you drive greater value out of existing security investments. It breaks down data silos by ingesting all data sources, giving you an accurate snapshot of your IT environment and an accurate risk score.

If you’re considering CAASM to address attack surface risk, here are some key considerations to help you determine if CAASM is right for your organization:

1. Do you still use manual processes like spreadsheets to classify and track data?

If you answered yes, it’s time to consider automated data discovery, classification, or CAASM technology to ensure you’ve got a complete and accurate inventory of your data.

2. Are you a larger organization with a complex security program and multiple technologies?

CAASM offers a single-pane-of-glass approach that can consolidate many of the tools and technologies you’re using, and enrich your inventories and data reporting by pulling all data sources into a single source.

3. Do you have a resource-strapped team or limited budget?

For the most part, CAASM solutions offer POCs so you can test whether it’s a good fit for your environment. Their nimble deployment also means you can get started fast, realize value quickly, and free up your team to focus their energy on high priority tasks.

4. Are you worried it’s a fad?

Cybersecurity technology is constantly evolving, but one constant is the need to discover, track, and manage sensitive data and the vulnerabilities that come with it.

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Technology comparison

Attack surface management is not new, but many of the technologies covered in ASM solutions categories are. That’s because innovative solutions tend to emerge from start-ups or spinouts from large or legacy providers. Legacy and traditional vendors can sometimes take longer to adapt their offerings to address nascent capabilities.

When looking for potential CAASM vendors, you’ll find a mix of established technology providers and newer start-ups. Every provider comes with pros and cons. You’ll need to weigh your requirements and use cases to narrow down the providers that match your needs.

As you evaluate vendor capabilities, look for these core capabilities:

• Inventory and asset discovery
• Data discovery
• Data risk
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
• Secure configuration of enterprise assets and software
• Access control management
• Continuous vulnerability management
• Cloud discovery

For more details on selection criteria and tips to navigate the marketplace, download our Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management Buyer’s Guide, then check out our self-guided demo to see if Cavelo’s CAASM platform is right for you.