What is CAASM (Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management) – And Does Your Business Need it?
Today’s borderless workplaces mean the perimeter no longer exists, and an almost limitless attack surface exists.
The cybersecurity industry is full of confusing acronyms that make sourcing solutions challenging. In this article, James Mignacca, CEO at Cavelo, reviews cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM), a newly coined technology category, and security best practices businesses can apply before rushing to buy.
As a cybersecurity or IT professional, you’ll know that the industry’s alphabet soup is a running joke. But in truth, the ‘soup’ is necessary. The threat landscape changes every day, and so must the security industry and its best practice guidance.
According to a recent report from Accenture, 63% of high-growth companies have adopted a work-from-anywhere model. Workplace definitions are changing while inadvertently hyper-expanding the workplace risk surface.
Traditional data protection focuses on a business’s perimeter and the assets (hardware and software) that operate within its “walls.” Yet today’s borderless workplaces mean the perimeter no longer exists, and an almost limitless attack surface exists.
Distributed workforces and a greater reliance on connected devices and cloud services mean that sensitive data is everywhere. Without visibility, data becomes more vulnerable to attack. Add data sprawl to the mix, and suddenly businesses face a challenge that traditional security technology wasn’t designed to fix.
Falling into the CAASM
Last year Gartner identified Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management as an emerging technology in its 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations.
By definition, CAASM technology “enables organizations to see all assets (both internal and external) through API integrations with existing tools, query against the consolidated data, identify the scope of vulnerabilities and gaps in security controls, and remediate issues.”
By translation, this technology proposes to fix a challenge that many businesses face: gaining and maintaining complete visibility into all assets used by the company – and through a single pane of glass.
At a granular level, every hardware, software or cloud-based asset is as valuable as the data it contains. And in today’s world, every asset collects, shares and stores sensitive structured and unstructured data types that elevate cyber risk.
As a category, CAASM exists because of the rapidly changing threat landscape and the importance of having a hardy security posture. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a midsized business playing catch up, the question becomes: how do you ‘do’ CAASM? And do you need yet another solution to achieve it?
See More: Credential Stuffing: 6 Key Strategies to Defend Against a Growing Threat
Starting from Scratch
Improving your security posture always starts with embracing best practices and data protection and privacy frameworks. Whether you’ve got a team of 20, or a team of 2, layering security controls and processes ensures that your security program can scale to meet and face ongoing and ever-evolving threats.
The NIST data protection and data privacy frameworks and the CIS benchmarks are arguably the industry’s most recognized and universally applied guides. Regardless of what your security tech stack looks like, these frameworks encourage teams to focus on understanding what data the business has.
This is more easily achieved and sustained through automated data discovery and classification.
Getting visibility to your data and classifying it according to data types relevant to your business underpins fundamental data protection and regulatory compliance. Here are some examples in line with best practice pillars:
Data discovery and classification
Discovering and maintaining a data inventory by asset, automatically classifying sensitive data.
Identifying sensitive data types within the data inventory and defining relevant data types.
Querying, reporting and driving operational steps and strategy considerations using real data.
Data protection
Aligning to industry best practices.
Customizing settings makes it easy for employees to use systems securely (and more challenging to violate data policies).
Understanding critical data across all systems with an up-to-date inventory.
Compliance
Continuously updating data inventories, sensitive data classifications, data access permissions and data risk posture.
Lowering the complexity of compliance-based activities by maintaining a 10,000 ft view of the larger data landscape.
Seeing the full picture and being able to focus on specific areas to answer audit questions.
Data loss prevention
Managing organizational data policies by defining access boundaries for your data.
Getting alerted if customer or employee data is found where it shouldn’t be.
Discovering, tracking and defining data boundaries to ensure real-time alerts flag when action needs to be taken.
Incident response
Understanding where sensitive data lives on the network, how it’s protected, where it’s been used and who has access.
Responding faster when an asset goes missing or has been compromised by getting the insights needed for the asset in question, its data, and who accessed it.
Leveraging real data to make critical and time-sensitive response and remediation decisions.
As the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In cybersecurity speak, prevention used to mean preventative technology like intrusion detection and firewalls. Nowadays, prevention means process, and the process is supported by best practices.
Does Your Business Need CAASM Technology?
Your business likely uses a combination of technology and outsourced services to support its data protection efforts. It’s also likely that your current approach covers CAASM principles.
So, is it worth the spend? Here are some key considerations:
- Do you still use manual processes (read: spreadsheets) to classify and track data? If you answered yes, it’s time to consider automated data discovery and classification technology to ensure you’ve got a complete and accurate inventory of your data.
- Are you a larger organization with a complex security program and multiple technologies? CAASM technology 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.
- Do you have a resource-strapped team or a limited budget? For the most part, CAASM solutions offer POCs so you can test whether it’s a good fit for your environment. 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.
- Are you worried it’s a fad? Cybersecurity technology is constantly evolving, but one constant is the need to discover, track and manage your data and its vulnerabilities.
In today’s cyber climate, we’re all data custodians, legally and ethically responsible for the care and protection of the data we’re entrusted to. That starts with ensuring alignment to battle-tested and industry-accepted best practices and practical technology choices that match the needs of your business and its data protection strategy.
Where do you see CAASM solutions fit into your business, and how would they benefit you? Tell us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to know!
