Welcome back, digital explorers! 🌐 Is your CMDB a good map of your IT Enterprise? Or are pages missing?
Today, we’re diving into the fourteenth adventure of our Cybersecurity Observability use cases series.
This time, we’re not just dusting off old relics—we’re on a mission to reconcile and maintain the map of your IT environment: the Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
Imagine your CMDB as a treasure map. It’s supposed to show you every nook and cranny of your digital kingdom. But what happens when that map is outdated, incomplete, or just plain wrong?
One outcome is watching your security team flying blind at high speed. Not good when you’re up against cyber threats lurking in the shadows.
But don’t worry! We’re going to turn that old map into a digital masterpiece, using the power of CAASMCyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) focuses on man… and Axonius.
CMDBs are the backbone of IT asset management. They’re supposed to be the single source of truth. But in the fast-paced world of virtual machines and cloud computing, they’re often more like a puzzle with missing pieces.
What’s the problem? Well, for starters, CMDBs rarely capture every asset in your environment:
And let’s not forget the inconsistencies—different naming conventions, outdated OS versions, or mismatched data fields that leave your CMDB looking more like a guessing game than a reliable resource.
You’re left wondering: How can we secure what we don’t even know exists?
This is where Axonius steps in like a superhero, cape and all. 🦸♂️ Axonius takes your CMDB and injects it with a dose of CAASMCyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) focuses on man… magic. Think of it as turning your treasure map into a high-resolution GPS.
Axonius aggregates data from a galaxy of sources—endpoint agents, identity management systems, network monitoring tools, and more. It deconflicts this data, giving you a crystal-clear view of every asset, user, and cloud instance in your environment. No more missing pieces. Just one unified, accurate CMDB that your security team can actually rely on.
With Axonius, you can finally answer those nagging questions:
CMDBs aren’t just a challenge because they’re incomplete. They’re also fraught with traps. Ever tried running a simple network scan to update your asset inventory?
What, with remote work, cloud services, and IoT devices, that’s like using a metal detector in a coal mine—it’s not going to find everything. Lord only knows what it does have in there.
And some assets just don’t play nice with traditional tools. Maybe they’re hidden behind layers of network security, or they’ve gone silent and aren’t communicating. These are the gaps that leave your CMDB full of holes—and your network full of risks.
But with Axonius, you can dig deeper. It’s like having a treasure map that updates in real-time, showing you every hidden asset and every discrepancy.
Once we’ve got Axonius set up (remember, SJULTRA offers a free 30-day trial), we can start to fill in the gaps on the maps so future explorers can find that treasure (and those poor high-flying security folks can avoid the clouds!).
To keep your CMDB accurate, you need to connect to the right data sources. Here’s where to start:
A simple and useful way to reconcile differences between Axonius and CMDB platforms is to compare what has been seen in Axonius within a given timeframe, but never seen by a CMDB adapter source (in this case, ServiceNow).
One of the beauties of Axonius is the access to > 1,000 adapters (therefore, data sources) and it’s ability to reconcile them and let us query them
We can use this to check “what’s out there” in the IT landscape, using different tools, then check “what’s in there” in the CMDB — what’s the gap/difference?
So let’s stop pointing out all the problems with the CMDB and instead help to fix some.
When devices that should be added to your CMDB are found in Axonius, you can automatically add them using the Create CMDB Computer action under the Manage CMDB Computer category in the Axonius Security Policy Enforcement Center.
Any time a saved query provides new results, they can automatically be added to the CMDB using this enforcement. When additions are made to the CMDB, you can specify the CI table where they will be added, and specify additional fields to be added in JSON format.
People like me have been moaning about CMDBs since about 2004 when virtualization was starting to take over datacenters and we realized how unreliable CMDBs were — so we had to do huge IT estate scans…
…but with Axonius, that’s a thing of the past. It only took me 20 years to find it…. DAMN! 🙂
And don’t forget our no catch, no cost, no obligation, limited time free Axonius trial offer.
Read the Axonius documentation: Identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities
