How Avant Mastered Cybersecurity Asset Management With Axonius

Rapid organizational growth often brings along operational challenges — especially when it comes to cybersecurity asset management.

This was the case for the security team at Avant, a financial technology company that offers a full array of digital banking products to middle income U.S. consumers. As their business scaled, gaining visibility into a multitude of services and IT assets quickly became a challenge for Avant’s security team.

As Jared Gray, senior manager of security operations at Avant, put it: the security team was “spending way too much time... gathering information, [and] understanding host information and user information.” 

As Avant’s IT environment got more complex, the security team quickly realized:

• Their existing manual processes for asset inventory couldn’t keep up
• They lacked insight into where the gaps in their inventory and processes were
• Actions like policy enforcement suffered from a data-poor, manual approach
• It was hard to glean everything needed to aid incident response investigations

Gaining Visibility Into Assets With Axonius

The immediate value-add that Axonius brought to the Avant team was simple: centralized, accurate, and comprehensive data on their environment. 

The Axonius cybersecurity asset management platform offered an unprecedented amount of visibility into Avant’s services and IT assets, backed by unparalleled flexibility and service.

Axonius enabled Avant to:

• Centralize and enhance its IT data, revealing security gaps (like endpoints missing coverage) 
• Leverage the Axonius Enforcement Center to enhance security controls
• Increase and automate policy enforcement
• Decrease incident response time

At the same time, Gray’s team has carried the benefits of the Axonius cybersecurity asset management platform into unexpected areas, including compliance and PCI requirements, audit workflows, and more.

“All the adapters came out of the box, and we were able to quickly get a good idea of what our user base looks like, what our user profiles look like, what our [...] inventory looks like, without being so dependent upon other solutions and the upkeep of traditional inventory systems.” 

—Jared Gray, senior manager of security operations at Avant

Plus, Axonius provided unparalleled customer support to the Avant team, Gray added.

Strengthening Incident Response Investigations With Axonius

Today, the Axonius cybersecurity asset management platform is deemed as a key component of Avant's security posture. That’s according to Avant Security Engineer Andrea Youwakim.

With the clean data and simple execution enabled by Axonius, the Avant team has built an efficient, scalable security program to handle the demands of their growing environment. 

For Youwakim, the biggest advantage that Axonius has brought is that it has enabled the team’s core workflows run smoother.

Take incident response investigations, for example. Axonius has enabled Youwakim and her team to conduct a fully robust investigation, “quite literally in one place.” Axonius makes it incredibly easy to build a user profile when an investigation comes up — which means investigation across any board, whether that be incident response or vulnerability management, she added.

“I’ve been able to accomplish more robust investigations and gain more security knowledge without having to try nearly as hard.”

— Andrea Youwakim, security engineer at Avant

Check out the full case study here for a look at how the team at Avant leveraged the Axonius platform and the results they achieved.