Federal agencies rely on Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) to track and manage their assets. But here’s the challenge: CMDBs depend entirely on the data that gets fed into them.
When discovery tools miss devices, when multiple tools report the same device but with different details, when manual processes slow down or when new virtual environments spin up outside of standard procedures, those assets are either invisible or in conflict in your CMDB.
IT and security teams are forced to turn to manual processes to prevent duplicate or inaccurate CMDB records and update missed asset changes. Yet even then, the system inevitably lags behind the reality of the assets in Federal environments.
As a result, your inventory becomes incomplete or outdated and creates real risks, from failed audits to unaddressed vulnerabilities to disruptions in critical business operations.
Your Federal team faces a difficult choice. You can spend significant time and resources continually auditing the CMDB, manually joining data from disparate tools to seek out the truth. Or you can accept the risk that comes with low-quality, “dirty” data. Neither option is ideal when you are accountable for meeting Federal security requirements.
Fortunately, there’s a third, and much better option.
How to complement a CMDB with automated, actionable asset intelligence
To get a full picture of your asset landscape, you need to architect your asset data framework so that it continuously updates both itself and your CMDB. This is where the Axonius Asset Cloud platform comes in.
The Axonius Asset Cloud is an actionability platform that addresses the common gaps in CMDBs by automating asset discovery and inventory across the entire IT and security footprint. You get an always-current, comprehensive and accurate inventory of your entire asset ecosystem. Axonius also looks for potential policy violations and helps administrative and security teams in prioritizing configuration and vulnerability response efforts.
The Axonius Asset Cloud natively provides more than 1,200 adapters that connect to and integrate with commonly deployed security and IT tools, including 27 CMDB platforms. These adapters continuously collect information on 40+ types of assets across IT and security, including devices, users, software, vulnerabilities and configurations.
Axonius turns raw, noisy and overlapping data into a complete, accurate and always up-to-date model of your entire environment through the Axonius Asset Intelligence pipeline. The bar we set for the information Axonius serves is decision-grade output. Each stage in this intelligence pipeline solves a specific class of data engineering problems that static inventories, vulnerability scanners, SIEMs and CMDBs struggle to optimize on their own.
After building this normalized and correlated view of the assets and risks in your environment, Axonius then compares them to what’s in your agency’s CMDB, deletes unwanted or redundant tools from the list and adds any missing assets or metadata to your inventory. You can finally trade hours of data cleanup for decisive moves that secure your systems.
Security operations teams benefit from the Axonius Asset Cloud as well. The platform can automatically create remediation tickets whenever it discovers a vulnerability. Operations teams can be alerted immediately and prioritize their response to the tickets based on severity or urgency, confident that they have a clear and complete picture of affected systems, users and devices.
Post-incident, the same reports in the Axonius Asset Cloud give teams confidence that the incident has been fully resolved by confirming that affected systems, applications or user accounts have been successfully and completely remediated.
Supercharging your CMDB with Axonius accomplishes multiple objectives:
- Your agency gains a real-time, comprehensive view of all its assets, maximizing your CMDB investment and empowering both IT and Security operations.
- You can instantly identify rogue or non-compliant assets and respond to ticket requests within a day.
- You can uncover unused or legacy assets that are costing your agency money or putting it at risk.
- You significantly reduce manual CMDB upkeep and free up hours for higher-impact work.
Axonius in action: How the platform works with ServiceNow
Let’s take a look at how this works using the ServiceNow CMDB as an example. First, select the configuration items (assets) you want to ingest into ServiceNow. Axonius imports the selected data into ServiceNow via APIs. This allows you to query, visualize and take action on all of the CMDB data imported into the system.
From there, the platform goes to work, scanning assets, creating tickets, updating inventory and removing assets that should not be in the CMDB, all in real-time. You can then generate reports that highlight vulnerability gaps and items that require correction.
You can use the combination of Axonius and ServiceNow, or other CMDBs, to ensure compliance with FISMA, CISA BOD 23-01 and other relevant standards. The Axonius Asset Cloud platform can pull compliance data from ServiceNow, eliminating the need for manual compliance tracking through the CMDB.
Want to see Axonius in action? Here’s a quick demo by James Flores showing how Axonius improves CMDB coverage.
Leveling up your CMDB
In a time when Government efficiency is under the microscope, agencies need more than a CMDB alone to manage their assets effectively. While CMDBs are valuable for tracking configurations and relationships, relying on them as the sole source of asset information can be time-consuming, impractical and potentially inaccurate. This leads to significant lost hours, unnecessary costs and damaging security vulnerabilities.
The best option—the only option, really—is to complement your CMDB with a solution that gives you instant visibility into its coverage.
The Axonius Asset Cloud allows you to identify gaps, track trends, update CIs and asset data in the CMDB and power incident response teams. It levels up your CMDB to save time, money and your organization from potentially serious security risks.
Learn more at https://www.axonius.com/federal-systems.
Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator for our vendor partners, including Axonius we deliver solutions for Geospatial, Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Artificial Intelligence, Customer Experience and Engagement, Open Source and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Explore the Carahsoft Blog to learn more about the latest trends in Government technology markets and solutions, as well as Carahsoft’s ecosystem of partner thought-leaders.
“For government agencies, security is a key consideration when adopting cloud technologies. The latest solutions can actually help agencies improve their security posture because of the specialized and deep focus that cloud providers bring to their mission of providing scalable and secure compute, network and storage infrastructure. At Google, we take a defense-in-depth approach to security and have over 1,000 professionals whose sole job is to ensure the security of our customers’ data and systems. They have made it their mission to prevent bad actors — whether people, companies or nation-states — from accessing customers’ data.”
A main initiative is evaluating the data security capabilities of cloud solution providers that sell to state and local governments. StateRAMP ensures CSPs meet minimum security requirements and helps them obtain verification and achieve certification. These verification statuses were created by StateRAMP and must be certified by a third party. To simplify this certification process, StateRAMP has introduced “Security Snapshot.”