What is CAASM?

Cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) is a proactive way to identify, manage and reduce your cyber attack surface. CAASM gives unified visibility across all your assets, including on-prem, cloud and third-party environments. 

It helps security teams inventory and correlate data from multiple sources to better understand every connected asset and associated risk.

As your organization adopts new technologies and expands its digital footprint, its attack surface grows exponentially, creating security gaps and vulnerabilities attackers can exploit. 

Traditional asset management tools won’t give you a consolidated view across diverse environments. By unifying asset visibility with CAASM, you can more effectively prioritize and proactively remediate cyber risk.

The central role of CAASM tools is to provide a unified inventory of all known data about assets, risks and configurations. 

While some can directly scan the attack surface using passive or active monitoring, most CAASM tools integrate via APIs directly with existing tools to aggregate asset information. 

Common data sources include IT asset management, configuration management database (CMDB), network discovery, vulnerability assessment, external attack surface management (EASM), endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), cloud security, security information and event management (SIEM), operational technology (OT) security, identity and access management, software composition analysis, and DevOps, among others. 

CAASM collects asset information from various sources and stores it in a central data lake for analysis. 

It then rationalizes and normalizes asset information from various tools to deduplicate and standardize information formatting and create a consistent view of assets. 

It also rationalizes redundant or conflicting entries, such as different names for the same device in various tools.

It then enriches asset information with context from various tools to provide deeper insights, such as all known asset risk details for a given asset, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions, asset owner and usage, compliance status and asset relationships. Examples of asset relationships include asset-to-asset connectivity, virtual resources and workloads associated with an asset, and asset-to-identity relationships, such as users of an asset. 

CAASM tools assess and normalize risk across the attack surface to enable prioritization. 

Risk prioritization usually considers several important variables, including the severity of a risk based on priority or industry-standard scoring, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which uses a qualitative metric for vulnerability severity. 

Risk exploitability affects vulnerability prioritization by considering factors such as available exploit code for vulnerabilities and asset accessibility from the internet. 

Asset criticality focuses on asset roles, such as business or material impact, like the potential to disrupt a critical business service, process or function. 

Because most tools offer unique risk scoring, CAASM tools often provide their own or standards based on options to consistently score and prioritize risk.

With constant updates, CAASM tools detect new assets, configuration changes or emerging vulnerabilities to keep an up-to-date view of your attack surface and identify risky changes before they lead to incidents. 

You can perform simple or complex queries to identify patterns or perform routine cyber hygiene. Integrations support streamlined workflows such as opening tickets for remediation, emailing reports or sending alerts. 

CAASM tools often serve multiple audiences, from IT and compliance teams to security practitioners and executives. 

Dashboards and reports provide insights into asset inventory, risk trends and progress over time, compliance posture and visibility into other key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Consistent asset insights across silos enable better collaboration, decision-making and investment across typically disparate teams.

• Continuous asset visibility across your entire attack surface, including shadow IT, unmanaged devices and third-party assets
• Data aggregation and normalization from multiple security and IT tools to create a unified inventory of assets and associated risks
• Risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and exposure points related to each asset to determine risk levels
• Vulnerability prioritization capabilities and integrations with remediation workflows.
• Continuous monitoring and updates of your attack surface inventory to dynamically reflect changes and expose new risks

• Ensures comprehensive visibility into all cyber assets, including IT, OT, IoT, cloud, identities, applications, virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes.
• Improves risk assessment by proactively aggregating all known risk information associated with assets and normalizing risk scoring across disparate sources.
• Fosters better collaboration and trust with a consistent view of asset information across IT, compliance and security teams. 
• Streamlines remediation processes by integrating and automating security and IT workflows, such as opening tickets and providing recommended remediation steps.
• Reduces errors and delays that manual and periodic audits of asset information create with continuous discovery of assets and risks.
• Speeds and standardizes compliance reporting across domains by providing out-of-the-box reports aligned with regulations and benchmarks. 
• Provides technical and business context to better prioritize risk that could have a material impact on your organization.

Gartner defines continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) as “a set of processes and capabilities that allow enterprises to continually and consistently evaluate the accessibility, exposure and exploitability of an enterprise’s digital and physical assets.”

The CTEM process contains five steps: scope, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization. CAASM plays a key role across all five steps in the CTEM model. 

Integrating CAASM with CTEM gives you continuous, real-time visibility and efficient risk management to proactively manage your attack surface and reduce your overall exposure to threats.

Five steps to implement cyber asset attack surface management solutions:

1. Identify what your organization wants to achieve, like reducing blind spots or improving risk prioritization.
2. Evaluate cybersecurity tools for comprehensive asset visibility that integrate seamlessly with your existing IT and security stack.
3. Focus initial efforts on assets and critical business systems or previously overlooked risks.
4. Create workflows for discovery, correlation and remediation to use CAASM to add value to existing processes and systems.
5. Use metrics like risk reduction, mean time to remediate (MTTR) and visibility improvements to track progress.

Implementing and operationalizing CAASM as part of your security program can significantly improve visibility and risk management. However, because CAASM deployments require participation by a broad set of teams, tools and workflows, challenges can arise that slow or impede successful implementations. For example: 

• CAASM relies on integration with a broad range of tools to provide a unified view, but incomplete or inconsistent data can limit its effectiveness.
• Ensuring compatibility, configuring APIs and managing authentication across tools can be time-consuming and technically demanding.
• Large organizations with thousands of assets spread across multiple environments (on-prem, cloud, hybrid) may have scalability challenges.
• Inaccurate asset tagging, out-of-date information or incomplete inventories resulting from shadow IT can undermine the insight reliability or lead to visibility gaps.
• Many organizations lack sufficient security staff or skill sets to configure and maintain CAASM. 
• Stakeholders, such as IT teams with asset management tools or CMDBs, can resist CAASM adoption, data sharing or workflow changes.

Implementing and operationalizing CAASM effectively requires careful planning and focused execution. Here are a few best practices to help:

1. Streamline implementation by planning integrations early. Identify key tools and the availability and compatibility of their APIs, map data flows between tools and prioritize integrations that deliver quick value to stakeholders.
2. Enhance data quality by regularly auditing data for completeness and accuracy, normalizing and identifying duplicate or conflicting data, cleaning data in integrated systems and defining processes and owners to maintain continuous data quality.
3. Start with a few high-impact use cases that directly address your organization’s priorities, such as improving compliance or reducing your attack surface. Define metrics, such as the volume of risks identified and remediated, to quantify and demonstrate the success.
4. Get stakeholder buy-in for successful adoption. Engage teams early. Educate them on CAASM’s benefits and share quick wins to build trust and confidence. 
5. Invest in automation to streamline processes, enable data aggregation, automate workflows like ticket generation in IT platforms and set up alerts for critical risks to ensure faster and more consistent responses.
6. Leverage reporting capabilities. Create customized dashboards, monitor trends over time and align reports with compliance requirements. Provide actionable insights and demonstrate measurable value to leadership and stakeholders.

CAASM focuses on internal assets and consolidates data from within your environment. External attack surface management (EASM) targets your outward-facing assets visible to attackers. 

EASM identifies risks like exposed services, misconfigurations and shadow IT from an external perspective, which complements CAASM’s internal view. Together, EASM and CAASM give you a holistic understanding of your entire attack surface and risks.

CAASM tools empower key stakeholders with actionable insights tailored to their unique responsibilities. 

Chief information security officer (CISO)
CAASM gives CISOs unified asset inventory risk prioritization and complete visibility into cyber assets. With this data, CISOs can enhance their strategic decision-making processes by focusing resources on addressing the most critical risks to security.

Security operations (SecOps) team
CAASM streamlines vulnerability management and accelerates incident response with real-time asset and risk context. A CAASM solution enables SecOps to remediate vulnerabilities faster with optimized threat response. 

Compliance officer
By validating and monitoring regulatory compliance, a CAASM can simplify compliance processes and reduce penalty risk. With automated reporting capabilities you can build audit confidence and get up-to-date compliance insights right at your fingertips.

IT operations manager
CAASM supports continuous monitoring of security controls like MFA and encryption to ensure consistent implementation across all systems. This solution also minimizes operational risks misconfigurations create and enhances overall IT security management.

Cloud architect
CAASM identifies shadow IT and misconfigured cloud assets, offering insights into unmanaged resources within dynamic cloud environments. You can use this information to more effectively reduce your attack surface and ensure cloud deployments adhere to organizational policies and security best practices.

Risk management officer
CAASM can assess supply chain risks, like vendor assessments, to reduce vulnerability exposure and ensure your partners’ security and compliance practices meet your organization’s standards and other requirements.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) lead 
CAASM supports rapid cyber risk identification and assessment for newly acquired entities. By addressing vulnerable or non-compliant assets before integration, you can secure your overall M&A process.

DevOps Engineer
By integrating into CI/CD pipelines, CAASM monitors applications for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations for secure application deployment while maintaining DevOps workflow agility.

By aligning CAASM capabilities with the specific needs of roles, you can foster collaboration and ensure a proactive approach to managing their cyber attack surface.

Check out Tenable's additional CAASM resources and products to gain further understanding of cyber asset attack surface management and how it helps identify, prioritize and close cyber exposure.