5 ways to finally take action on your security data: Insights from CTRL/ACT

In cybersecurity, visibility is just the beginning. Action depends on truth. But truth is hard to come by when information is fragmented, incomplete, and constantly changing.

That’s the spirit behind CTRL/ACT, our annual industry conference that brought together cybersecurity innovators to tackle the big questions: 

How do we turn visibility into action? And how do we make outcomes the point, not the afterthought?

Organizations already have dashboards, detections, and plenty of data silos. What separates teams that lead from those that lag is their ability to turn that disjointed data into asset intelligence, and then into action. That’s how you understand what’s real, what matters now, and how to fix it safely at scale.

At CTRL/ACT, we saw what it really takes to turn visibility into action. Here are five ways your team can bring it to life.

For a deeper look at the sessions and insights highlighted here (plus many more), watch CTRL/ACT on demand.

1. Focus on outcomes, not dashboards

Dean Sysman, our CEO, opened CTRL/ACT with a simple but disruptive idea: visibility is just the beginning. The future belongs to teams that act with confidence. This is the actionability era, where success is defined by what you can solve, not just what you can see.

It’s less about reacting faster to alerts and more about changing how you operate. That shift begins with asset intelligence you can trust: a reliable, unified understanding of your environment that turns every insight into an opportunity to move.

“Dashboards alone don't solve problems. Boards are demanding outcomes, and security teams need solutions that don't just show issues but help fix them.”

– Dean Sysman, CEO & Co-Founder, Axonius

2. Build a continuous operating model

The real challenge comes with turning actionability into an operating model that actually works. That’s where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) comes in.

In his session on putting CTEM into practice, Ivan Dwyer, Senior Product Marketing Strategist at Axonius, shared a framework any security team can adopt. It reframes exposure management as a continuous loop, not a quarterly checkpoint.

This model is built on constant validation. High-performing teams don’t wait for drift to surface. They detect, decide, and deliver in real time. 

“It’s simple but powerful: declare what you want to be true, detect any drift from that truth, and decide how to return to the truth. 

Declare. Detect. Decide. When you anchor CTEM around this mental model, the operating model lights up, becoming less of a framework, and more of a force.”

– Ivan Dwyer, Senior Product Marketing Strategist, Axonius

3. Anchor decisions to one reliable source of truth

Public-sector security teams live the “too many tools, too many alerts” reality across dozens of departments, each with its own systems, policies, and priorities.

At CTRL/ACT, the City of Los Angeles showed that real progress came from choosing one dependable source of truth and automating the workflows that keep that truth intact across vulnerability management, endpoint security, and threat intelligence.

“There are so many different tools in the SOC: you have vulnerability management tools, you have tools covering endpoint security, network security, threat intelligence, the list goes on. 

Axonius really helps in consolidating them all, and having that one spot where you can have visibility into your assets and organization. ” 

– Joanne Scott, Senior Security Analyst, City of Los Angeles

4. Treat asset visibility as a lifeline (especially in healthcare) 

Few industries face the kind of stakes healthcare does. Every disconnected system or unmonitored device can impact patient safety.

In his session, Daniel Brodie, CTO of Axonius Healthcare, discussed how visibility in healthcare environments goes far beyond IT hygiene. With IT, OT, and clinical devices, many agentless or intermittently connected, exposure management becomes exponentially harder. True visibility unites teams around one trusted source of truth, helping them reduce risks faster.

“Axonius for Healthcare extends the asset cloud beyond IT into IoT, IoMT, and OT. We're not just counting devices. We're showing which devices have exposures and why they matter. 

We continuously discover and classify clinical assets and then link the CVEs and configuration gaps directly to each device, so security, HTM, and executives can act from the same single source of truth.”

– Daniel Brodie, CTO of Axonius Healthcare, Axonius

5. Build for scale, but only on a foundation of trust

Speed is everything in cybersecurity. But at a global scale, speed without trust just multiplies risk.

In a fireside chat featuring leaders from Western Union and AWS, the conversation centered on how large organizations keep pace with their expanding attack surfaces without losing control. The answer was alignment.

“Some stuff that we hear from customers is that they need guidance on creating processes that help keep up with the rate of change at scale. It's absolutely critical for organizations like Western Union to have complete visibility across their entire IT landscape in order to achieve those objectives. 

Having the proper tools in place, like Axonius, enables our customers to integrate cutting-edge technologies into even the most critical workloads in highly regulated industries."

– John Walsh, Partner Solutions Architect, AWS

What we learned at CTRL/ACT, and what comes next

CTRL/ACT was about progress: how today’s leaders are finally closing the gap between visibility and action.

The organizations leading the way are the ones uniting people, process, and technology around a single source of truth, and proving impact through outcomes, not effort.

See how the actionability era is unfolding. Watch CTRL/ACT on demand and explore every session, story, and takeaway.