Cybersecurity is at a major inflection point. The volumes of issues that stem from an expanding attack surface are shifting more focus towards proactive resilience over pure reactive incident response. To get the job done, teams are looking beyond visibility into ways to take meaningful action. And the rise of AI is illuminating the need to bolster defenses while providing new ways to automate and scale operations. 

We’ve been witnessing these trends firsthand at Axonius, working with our customers and partners every day. Across asset management, vulnerability management, and security operations as a whole, we’ve noticed a market convergence and declared the CAASM category that we pioneered to be dead. Not because it failed, but because it worked. The promise of proactive cybersecurity measures is finally taking form in a real, tangible way.

This market convergence was a driver for the Software Analyst Cyber Research (SACR) Market Guide 2025: Evolution of Modern Risk and Exposure Management Platforms. Axonius is honored to have been featured in the report, and it echoed a lot of what we’ve been striving towards as the leading Asset Intelligence platform in the market.

Francis Odum, Asqa Taylor, and the SACR Research team broke down the complex market landscape in depth, providing teams building exposure management programs with an actionable blueprint. The whole team at Axonius extends our gracious thanks for a job well done!

Why exposure management is the convergence point

The global attack surface represents the totality of an organization’s environment. It spans every device, network, identity, SaaS application, piece of software, and every deployed infrastructure resource. The typical IT and security stack provides visibility and compensating controls in places, but it’s at the aggregate where exposures arise, and it’s at the aggregate where issues must be addressed. 

That’s because exposures come in many forms from all angles, and more often than not, cross-functional domains. Not every exposure is a vulnerability, and not every vulnerability is an exposure. Prioritizing risk means having total awareness of the attack surface in one place to make smart mobilization decisions. 

As such, the market convergence rightfully treats exposures at the aggregate, rather than within individual functional siloes. Tools within that same IT and security stack are reporting findings and issues that need to gather context from other areas to effectively assess risk. That context is needed to take effective action to remediate.

"Modern risk exposure management platforms transform past approaches to defining exposure with exploit context derived beyond static configuration reads, true network reachability analysis via simulations, probability of exploit beyond static feeds like EPSS and KEV, social intelligence derived from internet chatter, bi-directional integrations with ticketing platforms to reduce stale risk states and AI-assisted prioritization and remediation. They unify asset intelligence, threat context, business data, and automation to measure, explain, and act on real risk." – Market Guide 2025: Evolution of Modern Risk and Exposure Management Platforms, SACR

How Asset Intelligence transforms visibility into actionability

Amidst the inflection points the industry is facing, we see Asset Intelligence as the link across it all. It’s the total environmental awareness to make sense of the global attack surface, the context layer to make smart prioritization decisions, and the orchestration engine to mobilize remediations.

The reason we champion Asset Intelligence is the data dependency across those functional areas. We’ve invested years into building the most comprehensive aggregate data pipeline to ensure context is always complete, accurate, and up-to-date. This means correlating across domains, normalizing asset profiles, enriching with real-time intelligence, and modeling relationships to fully understand the nature of an exposure and how to address it.

The SACR Research team noted that there are two primary paths leading to unified exposure management: via aggregators or via scanners. We strongly believe that aggregation is the right path to achieving a well-oiled exposure management program. Not just because of the data dependency, but also the ability to orchestrate actions via a central operating hub.

“Leaders emphasized the need for comprehensive visibility with contextualized risk priorities across all assets in increasingly dynamic environments. Practitioners consistently voiced the need for a single, unified coverage model that can give them visibility with an easy onboarding experience.” – Market Guide 2025: Evolution of Modern Risk and Exposure Management Platforms, SACR

The proof is in the customer results

The SACR Research team evaluated Axonius as part of their research. They highlighted our unique ability to aggregate and correlate asset data from many sources, combine context to prioritize exposures of all kinds, and the multiple mobilization modes we offer via automation, workflows, and tickets.

They also spoke with a customer who has leveraged the platform as the anchor for their exposure management program. Their challenge was not uncommon in this space: “We were getting too many vulnerabilities and so we had difficulty prioritizing them so that we could make sure that we’re focused on the most important vulnerabilities first.”

In working with their Axonius account team, they were able to achieve phenomenal results, aggregating all reported issues into one place, factoring in all the surrounding context, and calculating a meaningful score for each that better reflected prioritized risk. The results speak for themselves. “What we now focus on is probably 5-10% of what we told remediators to worry about in the past.”

“The platform unifies asset aggregation and correlation across devices, software, identities, applications, and infrastructure, combining security scores with business context to help organizations prioritize and manage risk effectively. Key capabilities include AI-assisted recommendations, exposure management that integrates posture, exploit, identity, network, and application context, along with case management, workflows, and remediation recommendations.” – Market Guide 2025: Evolution of Modern Risk and Exposure Management Platforms, SACR

Actionability is the next frontier

Asset Intelligence is key to better exposure prioritization, but it’s also the trigger for intelligent action. Just as exposures come in many forms, mobilization happens in many ways. While the promise of AI has incredible potential to be a force multiplier for security operations, effective remediation is a combination of automation, coordinated workflows, and traditional ticket management.

As mentioned, we also see actionability happening at the aggregate. The ability to orchestrate the right actions at the right time. Sometimes that can be a one-shot fix, other times it requires gathering proper asset ownership, tapping teams, and distributing the work. Another notable finding from the SACR Research team is how remediation operations bridge security and IT teams. We couldn’t agree more. 

“Leading platforms now include bi-directional ticketing, fix aggregation, SLA tracking, and automated verification to ensure findings translate into measurable risk reduction.” – Market Guide 2025: Evolution of Modern Risk and Exposure Management Platforms, SACR

We highly recommend reading the whole report here.

Kudos to Francis Odum, Asqa Taylor, and the whole SACR team for such stellar research. Keep up the good work!

To learn more about how Axonius transforms asset intelligence into intelligent action for your exposure management programs, request a demo today!