Welcome to the tenth installment in our series exploring the practical applications of Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASMCyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) focuses on man…). 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?
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.
Maintaining an up-to-date user inventory is no small feat. Here are some of the challenges cybersecurity professionals face:
Given these challenges, many enterprises have settled for partial solutions, focusing on identity and access management (IAMIdentity and Access Management is the technology and process…) for their most critical applications. But in today’s complex digital landscape, is that enough?
This is where SJULTRA’s CAASM services, powered by Axonius, becomes your incident response nitrous boost.
It’s like giving your security team a time machine and a crystal ball, all rolled into one.
Axonius pulls data from a smorgasbord of sources:
By correlating this data, Axonius 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.
Let’s explore how to use SJULTRA CAASMCyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) focuses on man… to maintain an accurate user inventory:
Directory services are an important baseline for users. They can help with user data correlation from other sources, simply because of the abundance of data objects typically populated in directory services. This could include a directory services platform like Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or cloud directory services like Microsoft Azure AD, AWS Directory Service, GSuite and OneLogin.
Identity and access management solutions are great sources because they are typically expansive in terms of enterprise-wide employee and user coverage and contain information about user security and access groupings, and access to specific applications and services.
Other common sources you can leverage to find information on users include:
By connecting Axonius 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:
This simple query will return ALL admin users from ALL data sources.
Axonius will now “normalize” all of this data such that you can see, for each user, on which systems they have admin rights.
Using Axonius, you can interrogate the status of user accounts and passwords so you can check:
This is how you “codify your security policy” by creating Axonius queries against all of your data sources, which is really devices and their configurations, and users.
The next step is to enforce the policy.
Any time a saved query surfaces user-related security concerns, security and risk teams can take actions including:
Maintaining an accurate user inventory is crucial for robust cybersecurity and efficient operations. With SJULTRA CAASMCyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) focuses on man…, you can transform this challenging task into a streamlined, automated process.
Remember, this is just one of the 14 powerful use cases for CAASMCyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) focuses on man…. 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!
Read the Axonius documentation: Maintain an accurate user inventory.
