CAASM Use Case #10 – Maintain an Accurate User Inventory

CAASM Use Case #10 – Maintain an Accurate User Inventory

Welcome to the tenth installment in our series exploring the practical applications of Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM). Today, we’re diving into a critical use case: maintaining an accurate user inventory across your organization.

Picture this: You’re a CISO preparing for an audit, and you need to provide a comprehensive list of all user accounts across your company’s varied systems.

Sounds simple, right?

But as you start digging, you realize the task is far more complex than anticipated.

User accounts are scattered across databases, applications, directory services, and identity management platforms.

How can you possibly maintain an accurate user inventory?

Table of Contents

The User Inventory Challenge

A user inventory is more than just a list of names. It’s a complete catalog of every user account across an organization’s varied systems.

These accounts are the keys to your digital kingdom, serving crucial purposes in authentication, authorization, and accounting controls.

An accurate, comprehensive user inventory is fundamental to numerous administrative, operational, and security workflows.

Hurdles in User Account Management

Maintaining an up-to-date user inventory is no small feat. Here are some of the challenges cybersecurity professionals face:

  1. Fragmented ownership: Different systems and platforms are often managed by separate teams, leading to siloed information.
  2. Integration complexities: Developing and maintaining integrations with various data sources can be time-consuming and technically challenging.
  3. Rapid changes: User characteristics change frequently across multiple sources, making it difficult to keep information current.
  4. Inconsistent naming conventions: Varied naming conventions across systems make correlation rules complex and difficult to implement.

Given these challenges, many enterprises have settled for partial solutions, focusing on identity and access management (IAM) for their most critical applications. But in today’s complex digital landscape, is that enough?

Enter SJULTRA's Cybersecurity Observability Service

This is where SJULTRA’s CAASM services, becomes your incident response nitrous boost.

It’s like giving your security team a time machine and a crystal ball, all rolled into one.

CAASM pulls data from a smorgasbord of sources:

  • Endpoint Agents
  • Configuration and Patch Management Tools
  • Ticketing & Helpdesk Platforms
  • Networking Tools
  • Vulnerability Assessment Tools
  • IAM Solutions
  • Cloud Infrastructure

By correlating this data, CAASM creates a rich, unified view of your entire digital ecosystem. It’s like having a digital map of your entire IT landscape, with every device, user, and cloud instance clearly labeled.

Book your free CAASM trial now

Get visibility on all 14 cybersecurity observability use cases in less than 30 days with SJULTRA.

Technical Deep Dive

Let’s explore how to use SJULTRA CAASM to maintain an accurate user inventory:

Connect Data Sources

Define Queries

By connecting CAASM to many data sources that contain user inventory data, these are the kinds of fields available to query and use to maintain your user inventory:

sjultra axonius use case 10 maintain user inventory User Table

Find all admin users

This simple query will return ALL admin users from ALL data sources.

sjultra axonius use case 10 maintain user inventory query wizard Admin True

CAASM will now “normalize” all of this data such that you can see, for each user, on which systems they have admin rights.

sjultra axonius use case 10 maintain user inventory query results Admin True Results

Find Users and Devices breaking password policies

Using CAASM, you can interrogate the status of user accounts and passwords so you can check:

  • If your password security policy is to rotate every 180 days: which users have not rotated passwords?
  • If you mandate password access to all devices, which devices have accounts with passwords disabled?

This is how you “codify your security policy” by creating CAASM queries against all of your data sources, which is really devices and their configurations, and users.

The next step is to enforce the policy.

Taking action with CAASM enforcement actions

Any time a saved query surfaces user-related security concerns, security and risk teams can take actions including:

Summary

Maintaining an accurate user inventory is crucial for robust cybersecurity and efficient operations. With SJULTRA CAASM, you can transform this challenging task into a streamlined, automated process.

Remember, this is just one of the 14 powerful use cases for CAASM. Stay tuned for our next installment to discover more ways to enhance your cybersecurity posture.

Ready to sort out your user inventory?  Start your free trial of SJULTRA CAASM today!

documentation and Videos

Read the documentation: Maintain an accurate user inventory.