Having complete visibility of your business assets is the first step towards securing your attack surface. But what is an asset? As per the NIST’s special publication, an asset means ‘’Anything that has value to an organization or a person.’’ 

Then, what does value mean to a business?

Almost everything used to run a business has value to a company. It can be data stored in cloud services like Azure or AWS, communication tools like Slack or Zoom, code repositories such as Bitbucket or GitHub and more such tools that ensure day to day operations of an organization.

These assets of value must be monitored continuously to detect for any security vulnerabilities and immediate remediation. Monitoring this continuously can be challenging for environments that are vast, with thousands of integrations and nodes that attackers can exploit. This is where Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) tools come in. 

In this article, we’ll deep dive into the top Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solutions in 2023. 

What are CAASM tools?

Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management or CAASM tools utilize API integrations to link with existing data sources, automatically finding as well as validating security controls while remediating issues. CAASM tools are the foundation for real-time, automated monitoring of security posture, risk reduction, early threat detection, and maintaining regulatory compliance throughout the org.

CAASM tools help security teams with the following:

• API integrations with existing internal tools in use to build a complete inventory of all internal and external assets.
• Query against the data sourced from this asset inventory data.
• Identify vulnerabilities and address gaps in security controls.
• Prioritize issues based on the potential damage they can cause.

10 Best CAASM tools 

Here are top 10 CAASM tools listed:

Sprinto

Sprinto is a powerful security and compliance automation platform with Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management(CAASM) capabilities that provides integrated risk assessment for scoping risks and implementing control measures across the org, at scale and entity level– all in real-time, all from a single dashboard. It seamlessly integrates with cloud infrastructure to map entity-level controls, identify gaps, and implement measures that mitigate them. 

As per G2, Sprinto has been recognized as a Leader in Security Compliance categories for four consecutive quarters, making it the top choice for companies looking to strengthen their cybersecurity posture, automate compliance, or mitigate disasters.

Key features:

• Continuous control monitoring-Sprinto is well-oiled and geared up for continuous monitoring of security controls – right down to the entity level as well as at scale. 

• Vulnerability and Incident Management– Identify, mitigate, and document security incidents and vulnerabilities. Take prompt actions to produce proof of corrective measures aligned with audits across frameworks.

• Systematic escalations-Sprinto splits up tasks in a rule-based, organized fashion across team members, defining a clear order of priority –failing, due, and critical– to maintain the status quo while ensuring smooth remediation.

• Maximum integrations– With over 100+ integrations available, Sprinto is compatible with almost any modern-day cloud services.

• Cloud expertise: Sprinto is a cloud-native platform purpose-built to provide end-to-end coverage and solve the security compliance needs of fast-growing cloud companies.

• Data Encryption: Encrypt your data end to end to safeguard against unauthorized access.

• Analytics and Reporting: Get a comprehensive view of your company’s security posture with Sprinto’s real-time reporting and analytics capabilities.

Pros

Data Loss Prevention capabilities to safeguard data in a scenario of a disaster. Dr. Sprinto MDM to manage mobile and endpoint devices. Role-based access control to define and segregate duties across the org. Automate compliance workflows across frameworks end-to-end and take away the manual efforts. Modular security training programs to generate cyber security awareness among employees. Integrated audit success portal and 100% async audit. Build trust proactively with your stakeholders with a shareable security posture to provide a comprehensive account of your security measures, policies, and compliances.

Cons

They are always updating their solution stack and adding new features. Though that’s good, it can sometimes feel like a con.

Axonius

By providing complete insights into the attack surface, both internal and external, the Axonius platform enhances security coverage. The tool offers automated response actions by aggregating, deduplicating, and normalizing data, from IT and security solutions. 

Key Features	Complete inventory of your environment – It provides an up-to-date inventory of all assets derived from data of hundreds of deployed sources without the need to install agents, network scanning, and traffic sniffing.  Query to identify vulnerabilities and gaps – You can easily detect and validate security policies and controls, conduct surface coverage gaps, and perform quick investigations with the Axonius query wizard.  Remediate risks and vulnerabilities – whenever an asset deviates from its status quo, an automated trigger is sent.
Pros	The tool offers complete visibility by connecting and gathering information from most of the products. Make API calls to many data sources by aggregating CSV reports. The platform gathers data from several sources and offers useful APIs to other systems. The tool identifies security controls on endpoints efficiently and provides a dashboard with the required metrics and data about security issues.
Cons	The query capabilities are not up to the mark and fall short in a few instances (ex: if-else queries), thus offering no way to organize the metric cards stored. The platform doesn’t provide visibility or efficient graphs that aid users in understanding the data reports. The connectors don’t sync up sometimes.

JupiterOne

JupiterOne, a leading CAASM platform, enables businesses to compile cyber asset data across all of their tools into a unified, single view, which serves as the basis for all security operations.

JupiterOne integrates with your cloud infrastructure, security tooling, and DevOps pipeline to gather reliable asset data in one place. This unified, comprehensive view enables businesses to manage multi-cloud environments and cyber assets across hybrids effectively.

Key Features	Gain complete visibility across your asset inventory to uncover, assess and monitor all the hidden risks. Mitigate security risks by discovering structural elements of your environments, such as unknown intensity, workloads, user accounts, and security awareness gaps. Query consolidated data to answer complex questions. Accelerate incident response and remediation to proactively find the risks before they actually occur. Strong automated incident response system to accelerate the mitigation strategies to help you stay safe.
Pros	Automated reports and evidence collection features can help quickly visualize relationships in the digital environment. Maintain a secure environment using security categories and control the attack surface with efficient observability of IT assets. It is simple to build and execute a query quickly using JSON language support. Vulnerability tracking and Cloud network mapping. Understand the configuration, environment, and overall compliance accurately using query AWS resources.
Cons	Rate limiting leads to performance issues in the platform.  There is scope for improvement in the SaaS integrations as some desirable data elements are often not recorded by JupiterOne.

Noetic

Noetic offers continuous cyber asset management and control with full-stack visibility into your business assets. The platform empowers you to identify all the exposed and hidden assets and express the relationship between them. It helps you improve efficiency by identifying gaps.

Key Features	Real-time insights: Noetic covers all assets and entities within the organization, providing unified visibility across on-premise and cloud systems. Cyber relationship: Helps identify the security coverage gaps by mapping the relationship between an organization’s assets. Also, it flags policy violations & misconfigurations and prioritizes business risks based on resolution. Integrations: The software allows integrations with any third party to get a complete picture of the business risks. It provides automated workflows, continuously monitors all improvements, and resolves the risk. Identity and access management: Noetic creates a unified graph by integrating with identity and access management systems that describe roles, accesses, individuals, accounts, and user activity to the resources and assets you are safeguarding.
Pros	Understand the relationships between all of your assets and entities with user-friendly asset discovery. Builds an updated single point of truth to help security teams address data quality concerns, quickly detect coverage gaps, and prioritize business operations through a graph database. Make decisions based on real-time and comprehensive data with enhanced vulnerability management capabilities by delivering a consistent perspective of the ever-changing security environment. Integrate with endpoint security products such as SentinelOne, Windows Defender ATP, and CrowdStrike to determine and evaluate protection coverage across several tools.
Cons	Has a small user community for grassroots ideas and shared practice. Lacks in common CISO reporting requirements such as pre-built dashboards or queries that output to a BI tool.

Cyberpion

Cyberpion’s security platform identifies and rectifies threats by safeguarding the external attack surface. Gain visibility and manage risks streaming from clouds, websites, PKI, and DNS misconfigurations.

The Cybepion tool offers automated protection capabilities and blocks hackers with an immediate active protection system. It prioritizes risks and shares relevant solutions for mitigating the threats. It detects and mitigates vulnerabilities before they turn into potential threats and result in data breaches.

Key Features	External attack surface evaluation: Post discovering all the third-party connections and assets, Cyberpion enables risk mitigation evaluation strategies to help you make informed decisions on what elements to keep, remove, or initiate from your organization. External attack surface discovery: Cyberpion identifies all the exposed external assets of your business that might lead to cyber-attacks if any vulnerabilities are present. External attack surface management: Manage your assets by focusing on only the assets critical to the business and the security team while de-prioritizing or eliminating the other irrelevant assets. This results in protection against the exploitation by hackers or data breaches aimed at your organization.
Pros	Examine third-party connections of your system using a strong asset discovery engine.  Find all the hidden assets by mapping the online attack surface. Get complete visibility into your external asset surface.  Helps security teams to analyze and rectify connections and assets that are vulnerable to external threats.
Cons	Limited integrations Deployment for only SaaS software and does not support other platforms or devices. In the early stages, the scope for improvement.

Brinqa

Brinqa is a CAASM tool that offers a unified knowledge graph by seamlessly integrating all business and security data sources. It provides automated data transformations, correlation, and normalization with the Brinqa connector framework.

Brinqa’s cyber risk service offers cyber asset attack surface management by utilizing knowledge-driven insights. It transforms contextual, security, and threat data into insights to identify risk and provide risk assessments for mitigating security issues.

Key Features	Risk assessment: It offers an efficient risk awareness program and procedures to apply consistent strategies across your asset repositories, security solutions, and attack surfaces. It improves cyber risk management by turning the insights into automated, targeted, and tracked actions. Risk management: Within the systems, an organization can have multiple risks at once. It is important to prioritize and analyze all the risks to manage them properly. A managed environment offers better risk mitigation strategies. The software provides enterprise-grade risk management solutions that provide remediation of threats and risk-aware prioritization. Risk remediation: The identified risks require to be rectified in the organizations. The tool offers future-proof solutions that develop as well as apply necessary knowledge to make informed decisions for risk remediations. It improves the system’s overall security posture using its most efficient security actions.
Pros	The platform analyzes security data by offering useful insights and automating routine security processes. With a trust plugin feature, the platform provides additional security.
Cons	Costly as compared to other software.

Sevco

Sevco Security utilizes a modern approach to asset intelligence to strengthen the overall security posture. The tool manages the asset inventory to provide a complete real-time asset ecosystem view. Its CAASM platform, for comprehensive report generation, aggregates inventory information from multiple sources.

Key Features	Data collection and processing pipeline: Sevco allows your organization, using native API integrations, to collect data and create an automated processing pipeline. A single data source might not provide all the necessary details. Thus, by leveraging several existing tools, Sevco’s multi-sourced approach provides accurate and comprehensive visibility into your organization’s asset inventory. Aggregation and correlation: An organization’s asset inventory is dynamic and ever-changing. To better understand security measures, it provides continuous real-time asset inventory details. The tool does exactly that by offering a detailed overview of your daily operations linked to asset inventory and creating comprehensive reports by ensuring all the data streams are analyzed. Asset Telemetry: For every change identified by any of your tools, Sevco generates asset telemetry with continuous data flow. The tool records every event. For continuous data processing pipeline changes, it generates asset telemetry in real-time, which can be easily searched to help in your investigations. API integration configurations: By offering real-time asset inventory with Venn diagrams, Sevco highlights security gaps and risks. Data publication: The software feeds data into existing processes and procedures in systems like SOAR and SIEM platforms.
Pros	With different technologies, the platform provides easy integration that enhances your cyber attack surface management and shares feedback on ways to improve your organization’s overall security. A single dashboard offers data insights, and you can utilize the reports to close the vulnerabilities.
Cons	The product still has some catching up to do in terms of reporting and data source features.  Because of complex reporting, queries occasionally need to be adjusted.

Resmo

Resmo offers a comprehensive solution for cloud-native teams to enable continuous cyber asset monitoring and security. Resmo provides SQL queries to ask questions and get real-time alerts and notifications for security and compliance violations.

Key Features	SaaS Discovery: Automatically identify which tools employees use and SaaS vulnerabilities. Identify and address internal security vulnerabilities such as overly permissive access rights, weak passwords, and Shadow IT through browser extensions and native integrations. Automated compliance and security checks. Flexible and in-depth asset analysis using free-text and SQL combined for easy querying. One-click integration with multiple cloud services and 70+ tools. Analyze every single change retrospectively using rules and asset history monitoring.
Pros	SQL-based data queries across a range of SaaS and Cloud providers, including AWS, Atlassian Stack,  Okta, GCP, Google Workspace, and more, to stay on top of changes.  Consolidation of users, repositories, vulnerabilities, and other key constructs. Valuable insights are shared through user-friendly dashboards.  Alerts customers about potential security vulnerabilities.
Cons	Scope for including more integrations. Pricing can be costly for start-ups.

RunZero

runZero is a platform for creating an inventory of assets and discovering networks. It assists in detecting on-premises and cloud-based assets, managed and unmanaged devices, endpoints both at work and at home, and IT and OT infrastructure. 

With the help of integrations, the platform enables the augmentation of your inventory.

Key Features	Scanning assets, including unknown subnets and RFC1918 subnets. Analysis and reporting of assets. Asset ownership tracking. IP address management for network topology.
Pros	Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)  integrations are available. Mobile Device Management (MDM) integrations are available. Augment your inventory management with SIEM, cloud service providers, and CMDB integrations.
Cons	Some menus and functions are not so intuitive. To enable network discovery requires at least one Explorer installed in the network.

VArmour

VArmour is a company that emphasizes application relationship management and specializes in cybersecurity. Its CAASM platform is designed to identify internal assets on the network while mapping their relationships. vArmour enables organizations to enhance their security position by identifying as well as visualizing the relationships between applications, thus helping them minimize their vulnerability to cyber threats.

Key Features	Application asset discovery as well as categorization. Application relationship mapping
Pros	In-built segmentation, isolation, and application controls. Machine learning analysis of user access and application behavior.
Cons	Limited cloud-workload protection features. Scope for improvement in IT security and application security features.

How should you select the right CAASM tools?

CAASM solutions enable your IT and security teams to monitor your entire asset inventory at a single source. They enable you to gain complete visibility into your internal, cloud, external, and on-premise assets. They help identify vulnerabilities and gaps and their scope, query all your data, and empower you with incident response and remediation capabilities. With these insights, your security team is enabled to be ahead of breach scenarios and mitigate issues at source.

To select the right CAASM solution, you should look for the following features:

Asset inventory

The first step to securing your attack surface is maintaining a complete asset inventory. CAASM solutions should help consolidate your asset data and continuously discover across your infrastructure and tooling.

Comprehensive visibility

Although asset inventory offers visibility, is that enough? CAASM tools should enable you to dive deeper into your environment and remedy gaps to achieve improved security posture and hygiene.

Relational context 

CAASM tooling helps you see your cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments to understand how your assets link to each other. This context is critical in securing each and every entry point and enables your security team to accelerate incident response while isolating threats.

Querying capability

Monitoring your entire cyber asset universe can be an overwhelming task, but the ability to query your data aids you in getting answers to the toughest questions while understanding who is responsible for each and every asset you have, what threats you need to be aware of, where your vulnerabilities lie, and more.

Alerting and Automation 

You can create a baseline level of security health with CAASM for your organization with standards for each asset. Your security or IT team can quickly identify the scope of a threat because CAASM continuously monitors your environment for new changes, threats, assets, and vulnerabilities to fast-track investigation and response.

Continuous compliance

Almost every business has a compliance framework that they need to adhere to, whether it be by customer request or industry standards. CAASM aids businesses in automating the analysis of cyber asset data and evidence collection to avoid compliance gaps and receive alerts in the case of compliance drift.

Benefits of CAASM tools

CAASM tools empower security teams with comprehensive and real-time attack surface visibility. This enables security and IT teams to collect information from the entirety of a company’s sources for proactive monitoring, evaluation, and threat prioritization.

With thousands of integrations employed by businesses in their day-to-day operations, maintaining an inventory of all cyber assets while ensuring continuous monitoring and mitigation can prove to be a challenging task. They enhance the overall cybersecurity posture of an organization by creating a series of proactive measures and a live asset repository to reduce the overall attack surface. 

Your organization will ultimately significantly reduce its threat landscape by implementing a CAASM solution because you will have a complete understanding of assets, be able to review your technology and processes risk levels– in real-time – and therefore be able to be considerably more reactive and proactive to cyber threats.

Key benefits of CAASM tools are:

Real-time, automated monitoring of your Security Posture

CAASM solutions help organizations get a better understanding of their digital attack surface, including all potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could be exploited by attackers. Businesses can significantly upgrade their overall security posture by identifying as well as addressing these vulnerabilities.

Risk Reduction

By continuously monitoring the cyber assets, CAASM tools gear you for any possible disasters or breaches. Risk assessment is crucial in today’s cybersecurity environments to help identify and address vulnerabilities. CAASM tools help proactively address vulnerabilities and breaches right from the start and mitigate the potential impact of attacks while preventing them.

Early Threat Detection

Creating an inventory of your cyber assets and monitoring them in real-time can help you mitigate disasters right from the start. If not addressed, these breaches or disasters can have long-term implications such as damage to reputation, penalties, and disruption in business operations. Potential threats and vulnerabilities can be detected early with historical data analysis and advanced prediction models to which security teams can respond swiftly to mitigate any emerging risks as well as potential security breaches before they can be fully realized.

Regulatory Compliance

Many regions and industries have specific compliance requirements and cybersecurity regulations. Compliance helps fulfill some of the following business requirements:

• Data Protection
• Operational Efficiency
• Mitigate Financial Risk
• Employee Retention and Engagement
• Enhance Public Trust
• Realise a Business’s Mission

CAASM can help businesses fulfill these requirements by actively managing their attack surface while ensuring security controls are implemented.

Expedites incident response

Automated asset intelligence aids incident responders in analyzing exactly where to focus their efforts.

Eliminates data siloes

The coverage and accuracy of an organization’s attack surface can be negatively impacted by conflicting data sources. CAASM tools provide security teams with a single source of truth.

Strengthen your cybersecurity posture with Sprinto

Maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture is the need of the hour for any business, small or big. It helps safeguard sensitive data, build trust with your stakeholders, and mitigate any business disruptions. Doing so manually, without help, can be a daunting task.

Don’t worry; we are here to help!

Sprinto is a comprehensive security solution for your organization. It seamlessly integrates with any cloud setup to map entity-level controls, run fully automated checks, and consolidate risk. A user-friendly yet powerful software, Sprinto puts your compliance across frameworks on auto-pilot, implements security controls across the org, and monitors your cybersecurity posture– all in real-time, all from a single dashboard. Get in touch with our experts to learn more.