CAASM is dead because it worked. What’s next is the era of Actionability.

As security infrastructures grow more complex, the need for asset management tools, systems, and solutions is critical for continued success. The introduction of Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) over the last few years helped address this need by identifying, monitoring, and managing all cyber assets within an organization to establish a trusted foundation for security and data integrity with an organization.

Just a few years after Axonius helped create the CAASM category and the industry embraced this approach, I stood on stage in March at our recent Adapt customer conference and declared that CAASM is dead, and the industry is moving beyond CAASM.

Last week, Gartner, a leading research and advisory firm, followed our declaration with similar messaging, sharing that the cyber and external attack surface management markets are “obsolete before plateau on this year’s Security Operations Hype Cycle. Their promised functionalities are now being incorporated into other, adjacent markets.”  

This is not because the market failed — in fact, the CAASM market is dead because it accomplished what it was created to achieve: visibility and context across a complex array of various integrated tools, systems, and teams.

CAASM proved to be of monumental value to security and IT teams and organizations; it allowed businesses to securely scale their digital infrastructure, communicate security risks through consolidated data, and provide real-time insights to audit and report on risk exposure.

But comprehensive, trusted visibility alone isn’t enough — overwhelmed by vast amounts of data and findings, teams need to know what to do next and why, supported by intelligent insights that allow them to take corrective actions. 

That’s why the death of CAASM has led to the emergence of a new “actionability era.” Organizations are transforming their asset intelligence into clear, prioritized, and executable actions, connected across their IT infrastructure, to enable teams to proactively address risk, optimize performance, and manage cost.

Why actionability, why now?

The realities of today’s IT environments, across public, private, and hybrid clouds, with a digital attack surface that is ever-increasing in both scale and complexity, are driving this urgent shift from pure reactive to proactive modes of security. Organizations need to adopt dynamic systems of truth to get ahead of threats before they become exploits.

For example, research from Gartner revealed that attacks on organizations in critical infrastructure industries alone have seen a 3,900% increase between 2013 and 2024. Threat actors are looking for every opportunity, every gap in essential infrastructures to exploit. Systems that lack a trusted source of truth, of comprehensive, correlated, and enriched data to drive actionability, are the most vulnerable to these malicious attacks.

CAASM is dead because we know visibility alone isn’t enough to support security and IT operations teams; tool sprawl and data silos are a growing issue for organizations that are managing hundreds or thousands of IT and security assets in a complex tech stack.

Organizations are often faced with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of vulnerabilities that could potentially become attack vectors. Dozens of asset types across thousands of systems require an intelligent, actionable, dynamic, and integrated approach to ensuring risk reduction, operational efficiency, and smart cost management.

To address this ever-growing challenge, teams need to be faster, and being faster means relying on the truth, having the correlated, enriched, and contextual data to rapidly make decisions with confidence. They need a source of truth that empowers them to know exactly how to act once an organization has identified a vulnerability, a misconfiguration, or an inefficient deployment of resources. It’s not just about asset intelligence — it’s about intelligent action.

Asset intelligence remains the foundation of this approach. It provides critical, trusted data across all of your digital assets to understand where you’re weak and where your most valuable assets are. Visibility is necessary, but insufficient if teams don’t know what to do with this data. This is where actionability steps in. Information needs to be contextualized, prioritized based on security, asset, and business context, and continuously up to date for teams to drive the most critical outcomes. 

We know we need actionability, but what does this look like in practice?

Intelligent action — how actionability can deliver a robust security infrastructure

Actionability is only as effective as the data powering it. Teams need to trust that the data they are given is accurate, complete, and up to date to ensure that any action they take is truly intelligent. When provided with trustworthy data, you can actually automate the remediation, not just the notification that something needs to be done.

This means that teams need to overcome data that is siloed, with system-specific tools that are disconnected from one another. Armed with trusted, actionable data, teams can build trust with other teams to solve problems together. There are five key steps to build this trusted data foundation:

1. Total discovery: Identify assets and vulnerabilities across your software environment to uncover every single one and consolidate them into one view.

2. Comprehensive correlation: Normalize, deduplicate, and enrich raw records from all sources so that asset data is always complete, accurate, and up-to-date.

3. Smart assessment: Assess high-value insights about risks, misconfigurations, and gaps in coverage across assets, and prioritize remediation.

4. Direct mitigation: Apply patches, configuration changes, and other mitigating controls to address threats and exposures, streamline operations, and validate compliance using automated enforcement and end-to-end workflows to close gaps, remediate misconfigurations, and mitigate risk at scale.

5. Continuous validation: Continuously monitor asset configurations and posture, providing real-time validation and clear reporting to track improvements over time.

At Axonius, these capabilities are driven by our market-leading Adapter Network, which features over 1,200 bi-directional API-based integrations that continuously aggregate, correlate, normalize, enrich, and associate asset data across over 40 different asset types and every major security, IT, and business system. This unmatched connectivity turns otherwise fragmented signals into a single, trusted source of truth that serves as the foundation for moving from visibility to actionability at scale.

By combining the right asset management tools with this approach, security and IT teams can take advantage of advanced, actionable insights that are validated against their entire tech stack. Accurate and proactive corrections are the hallmarks of a resilient environment and the backbone of an efficient and effective system, but it starts by having the truth in your data.

AI as the double-edged sword

There is no way to discuss the shift from CAASM to Actionability without considering AI. AI can help drive insights at scale when data overwhelms humans alone, but AI also introduces new risks into the environment.

AI is a double-edged sword — organizations that don’t take the necessary precautions may find themselves introducing new vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and inefficiencies into their digital environments. AI trained on sensitive data could be the source of a leak or a hack and reveal pertinent information connected to several areas of the business it touches.

Despite these added risks, AI can drive tremendous benefits in risk prioritization, automation to reduce or eliminate risk, and, ultimately, to drive intelligent action.

For example, the integration of advanced AI can help drive effective data pipeline integrations and automations, as well as simplified security and IT operations. Natural language prompts reduce product complexity and accelerate product onboarding, and generative AI can help make intelligent recommendations and automate remediations. This may even accelerate our path to true automated, self-healing IT systems that reduce or eliminate security threats continuously.

True cyber resilience requires actionability

Security and IT teams are prioritizing IT and cyber resilience above all else. Limiting ourselves to visibility, the original vision for CAASM, is not enough. Visibility without context raises more questions than it solves. A true actionability platform combines total visibility with context and the ability to drive change, rooted in the truth that only true asset intelligence can deliver.

CAASM is dead, but what’s emerging in its place is even more exciting and will define the cybersecurity industry for years to come.