I’m drawn to large-scale problems, I guess:

• At the onset of cloud computing, I was helping companies benefit from cloud economics without undue risks.
• Later, I switched to protecting data at numerous retail businesses that thought they couldn’t afford security.
• Next, I focused on stopping a seemingly endless stream of malware designed to bypass endpoint defenses.

For my new endeavor, I’m joining Axonius to tackle another massive challenge with severe security repercussions: IT asset management.

Asset management is such a foundational aspect of IT and security that it sounds utterly uncool. Yet, organizations increasingly struggle with tracking all the systems, devices, VMs, and containers that they need to secure. Legacy tools in this space struggle with the dynamic nature of modern IT paradigms like DevOps, IoT, and BYOD.

Axonius has an elegant solution. Instead of acting as yet another asset collector—be it a sensor, scanner, or an agent—Axonius connects to the data sources the organization already has, then correlates the details. By looking at each asset from several vantage points, Axonius quickly answers questions such as:

• Which endpoints are missing an agent?
• Which unmanaged devices are on the network?
• Which cloud instances aren’t being scanned?
• Which systems have critical vulnerabilities?

The response to what the team built so far has been inspiring, as evidenced by customer testimonials and awards such as the Most Innovative Startup at the RSA Innovation Sandbox. I will help Axonius continue the momentum, strengthening the way we help companies understand what they have, discover security coverage gaps, and validate and enforce security measures.

Axonius solves foundational problems for organizations across industries and sizes. A product that tackles a large-scale challenge that no one has quite cracked before… Call it what you want; I call it practical, necessary, delightful, and maybe even cool.

Updated October 3, 2019

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About the Author

Lenny Zeltser develops teams, products, and programs that use information security to achieve business results. He is presently the CISO at Axonius and an author and instructor at SANS Institute. Over the past two decades, Lenny has been leading efforts to establish resilient security practices and solve hard security problems. As a respected author and speaker, he has been advancing cybersecurity tradecraft and contributing to the community. His insights build upon 20 years of real-world experiences, a Computer Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA degree from MIT Sloan.

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