4 cybersecurity innovations that drive real action: Insights from CTRL/ACT

In cybersecurity, innovation only matters if it drives action.

But action depends on knowing what’s real in your security environment, and that’s nearly impossible when visibility is fragmented across tools, teams, and clouds.

That’s what CTRL/ACT, our annual cybersecurity conference, set out to solve: how to make actionability real through smarter automation, contextual visibility, and new capabilities powered by asset intelligence.

Across keynotes, customer stories, and product showcases, we explored what happens when product innovation is engineered to give teams the power to act. Here are four key breakthroughs from the event.

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

1. One platform to connect every domain (and every action)

Most security teams run dozens of programs, each valuable on its own but disconnected from the rest. The result is slow, siloed responses that make it hard to move from visibility to action.

At CTRL/ACT, Avidor Bartov, our Co-Founder and CPO, shared how new Axonius Asset Cloud enhancements are closing that gap. By linking every domain across IT, OT, IoT, and cloud into one unified layer, we’re giving teams the connective tissue to act automatically on trusted insights.

“Fragmentation is the natural byproduct of growth. Every new team, every new tool, every new workflow creates its own information lens in its own silo. 

That's why we built the Axonius Asset Cloud: to solve the information problem at the source with asset intelligence, to break through the silos without breaking the bank.”

– Avidor Bartov, Co-Founder and CPO, Axonius

That vision is coming to life through several new capabilities, including, but not limited to:

• Workspaces: Flexible platform experiences tailored to specific use cases

• Exposure Lifecycle Management: Prioritize and manage risks from end-to-end

• Asset Inventory Classification: Automatically detect device types during discovery

2. AI-driven, adaptive identity governance that’s adaptive and actionable

Identity management has hit a breaking point. For every human identity, there are now dozens of non-human ones. Amir Ofek, our CEO of AxoniusX, unveiled how we’re tackling this identity explosion with AI-driven governance that adapts in real time. 

Our platform unifies human and machine identities into one normalized inventory, applies behavioral analytics to understand context, and automates policy enforcement to keep pace with change. It’s a major step toward making identity governance actionable, not just visible, by tying every identity to clear ownership and control.

“Today, organizations are getting powered just as much by non-human identities, service accounts, APIs, bots, ephemeral containers, and AI agents as much as they are by people. 

And unless we govern them with the same rigor, the same context, and the same intelligence, we leave the door wide open to mess, to lack of compliance, and to threat actors.”

– Amir Ofek, CEO of AxoniusX, Axonius

3. Unified cyber asset management for security and IT

For years, security and IT have operated on parallel tracks: aligned in mission but divided by data. Teju Shyamsundar, Principal Manager of Product Marketing, and Jordan Farkas, Principal Sales Engineer, showed what happens when those tracks finally converge.

With our latest Axonius Asset Cloud capabilities, both teams can now work from a single, trusted view of every asset and take coordinated action to close gaps, optimize spend, and strengthen security posture.

“For many organizations, the CMDB serves as the system of record, which lots of people depend on for information that’s accurate and up to date. 

Axonius serves as this aggregation data point, which normalizes, dedupes, and deconflicts data and acts as a single pipeline back into the CMDB to make sure that it’s up to date and accurate.”

– Jordan Farkas, Principal Sales Engineer, Axonius

4. Vulnerability management without the burnout

Vulnerability management has reached a breaking point. The number of vulnerabilities is growing exponentially, but team resources aren’t keeping up. Frederico Hakamine, our Technical Evangelist, underscored that automation, context, and continuous processes are the antidote to an overwhelming backlog.

The key is shifting from reactive patching to continuous threat exposure management (CTEM). With our platform as the connective layer across all systems, your team can automate repeatable vulnerability management loops, add business context to prioritization, and codify collaboration through logic-driven workflows.

“Think about this: You get a new vulnerability that shows up on your radar, or you get a new scan. It leads to investigations, it leads to turning on the red light and getting to work on it. But by the time you get that alert, you're already running behind. 

What CTEM does instead is it implements a continuous process in which you're regularly seeing all the assets you have, all the issues they present, in order to prioritize, confirm what’s exploitable, and implement a fix.”

– Frederico Hakamine, Technical Evangelist, Axonius

Actionability in the wild: BlueLinx builds proactive security at scale

CTRL/ACT ultimately boiled down to one big idea: turning visibility into action. BlueLinx showed what that looks like in the real world.

The team uses Axonius to replace spreadsheets and scripts with automation, unifying asset, identity, exposure, and software management across 2,300 users and 60 locations. What once took weeks of manual correlation now happens continuously, giving them real-time visibility and control. It’s proof that actionability isn’t aspirational. It’s happening now.

“Axonius has become a big part of our ITGC and SOC processes. We’ve replaced a lot of manual enrichment that we were doing. 

We pull our user access listings, and typically we do a first pass to see if anybody in the source application is terminated or if they do not exist at all in our identity system. We actually gather that evidence through Axonius now, rather than having to go do manual lookups.”

– Matt Durant, Senior Director of Cybersecurity and Risk Management, BlueLinx

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

Visibility only matters if it changes what you do next. At CTRL/ACT, that idea came to life through every session: showing how teams are using new capabilities, grounded in asset intelligence, to stay ahead of risk.

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