Let‘s start by getting clear on why these rapidly emerging categories of solutions matter.
As your organization embraces cloud, mobility, internet-connected devices, and distributed applications, the potential attack surface expands exponentially. Without visibility, you run the risk of unseen vulnerabilities and gaps across old and new infrastructure.
This is where automated asset inventory and monitoring become fundamental to security strategies. Together, they serve as the GPS and radar for navigating dynamic modern environments.
Asset inventory provides that broad view of every component across your hybrid IT ecosystem – servers, devices, cloud instances, containers, apps, services. It‘s your map for what assets you have, where they reside, and their business function.
Asset monitoring takes this a step further by continuously tracking configurations, ports/protocols, processes, users, data flows. It flags deviations indicating potential security issues like compromised credentials, outdated software, violations of policy and more.
According to TechTarget, over 50% of data breaches occur due to missing patches, misconfigurations or access failures – problems that inventory and monitoring directly combat.
As your infrastructure complexity increases, scanning-based approaches reach limitations in maintaining always up-to-date visibility. The same holds for manual, spreadsheet-driven inventory tracking.
This is what makes cloud-based solutions so compelling. Their automated, unified capabilities scale securely across any size of hybrid environment while easing burdens on stretched security teams.
As you explore options tailored to IT security, you‘ll want to consider:
- Infrastructure coverage – Is discovery limited or does it provide comprehensive visibility across on-prem, cloud, containers, remote endpoints?
- Detection capabilities – Does it go beyond basic inventory to offer continuous monitoring of configs, processes and user behaviors?
- Security context – Does it analyze and score risks to let you focus remediations?
- Deployment & management – How easy is it to setup, integrate, customize and operate day-to-day?
Let‘s delve into 5 leading solutions purpose-built to address these requirements with cloud efficiency and scale.
Detectify – Optimized for External Web Security
Swedish startup Detectify focuses exclusively on protecting internet-facing assets – websites, APIs, mobile apps, networks – through continuous automated testing designed to mimic real attacks.
Capabilities span:
- Non-intrusive scanning checks for the latest critical vulnerabilities including injections, authentication bypasses, and business logic flaws
- Crowdsourced security research integrated into vulnerability tests
- Software stack monitoring detects outdated components
- Subdomain monitoring prevents domain hijacking risks
- Flexible notifications and integrations with DevSecOps toolchains
With a fully automated SaaS platform requiring zero infrastructure, Detectify brings hacker-powered security assessments to organizations struggling to keep pace with Agile development. Customers like Trivago and CBS Interactive leverage Detectify to scale web app security across global properties and rapid release cycles.
According to CEO Rickard Carlsson, Detectify has amassed "the largest crowdsourced vulnerability research in Europe" now powering coverage of 60,000+ threats.
Pricing tiers are based on the number of tested domains, scan frequency, and included API calls.
Qualys – Hybrid Cloud Inventory Leader
Qualys Cloud Platform offers the most mature and widely adopted solution for asset inventory spanning from data centers to cloud scale. In addition to completeness of global visibility, Qualys continues massive innovation in applying AI/ML and automation to IT security use cases.
Let‘s examine some key capabilities:
- Comprehensive discovery – Tracks traditional on-prem hardware and software together with cloud instances, mobile endpoints, containers, OT, IoT and more
- Always updated CMDB – Auto-learns relationships new assets, mapping communication paths
- Effortless consolidation – Normalizes disparate inventory data into unified dashboards
- Built-in automation – Orchestrates workflows for continuous compliance and security
With the Winter ‘22 release, Qualys introduced vulnerability prioritization specific to Internet facing assets – websites/apps. This automatically highlights which flaws are riskiest to focus patching.
According to IDC research, Qualys customers experience up to 60% cost savings over legacy tools and manual processes. The cloud-native platform scales seamlessly to support the largest environments while requiring zero hardware or software to deploy.
Qualys offers free community editions for vulnerability management, policy compliance and web application scanning – all leveraging the same revolutionary backend engine.
Ivanti – Hyperautomation Across Every IT Layer
Ivanti Neurons delivers end-to-end hyperautomation capabilities allowing devices to self-manage, self-secure and self-heal themselves. While competitors focus narrowly on discovery and monitoring, Ivanti looks to eliminate the need for human intervention via intelligent bots and policy engines.
Ivanti Neurons is an open architecture framework woven across every layer of the IT stack:
Discover & Monitor – Ivanti Neurons for Discovery provides a unified asset inventory and reporting dashboard consolidated across networks, cloud, IoT, and edge computing.
Heal & Secure – Ivanti Neurons for Healing enables automated patch deployment, configuration enforcement, performance remediation and more. Zero-touch bots ensure devices stay compliant, vulnerabilities are addressed and issues resolve faster.
Ivanti Neurons for Edge Intelligence leverages natural language processing (NLP) and analytics to provide intelligent visibility into threats across endpoints and automatically queries devices enterprise-wide.
Optimize Experiences – Ivanti Neurons also enhances user experiences by providing self-service automation capabilities embedded in daily workflows. Employees can fulfill routine requests like password resets, software installs, and device provisioning through a consumerized portal. This boosts productivity while reducing burdens on IT.
The platform scales to support the largest enterprises in managing hundreds of thousands of assets across complex hybrid infrastructure. Ivanti counts companies like Steelcase, ALDI North Group and DHL on its customer roster.
Tanium – Unified Endpoint Monitoring & Control
Tanium takes a fundamentally different approach – an agent-based platform that collects highly detailed endpoint information synchronized via peer-to-peer communication. This architecture provides complete visibility including deeper kernel and memory state inspection. It also enables enforcement of configurations, software installs, remote actions across managed devices.
According to Tanium CEO Orion Hindawi, most large organizations struggle with 10-30 different security tools only providing fragmented visibility. Tanium offers a truly unified endpoint management platform with a full suite of modular capabilities:
Asset Management – Discovers devices, classifies hardware/software, monitors for unauthorized changes
Risk Management – Continuously scans endpoints for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
Detection & Response – Analyzes asset states and activities to identify advanced threats
Compliance Enforcement – Locks down system settings to meet PCI, HIPAA and other policy requirements
With a single intelligent agent providing real-time state of IT assets, security teams can shrink the gap from alert to action. Tanium‘s customer base includes over half the Fortune 100 including United Airlines, Nasdaq, and Bank of England.
License fees scale based on number of endpoints under management. As one of the most mature players in endpoint visibility, Tanium offers advanced capabilities hard to find elsewhere. But it involves deploying an agent which may not suit all environments.
Tenable – Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) Innovator
Tenable helped pioneer the Vulnerability Management (VM) market with Nessus software. As cyberthreats and infrastructure complexity accelerated, the company made the strategic move to cloud delivery.
Tenable.io covers the widest possible spectrum of IT infrastructure silos within a unified SaaS platform:
- Traditional internal networks and endpoints
- Operational technology (OT) like building systems
- Cloud resources and containers
- Mobile devices
- Internet-facing websites and apps
This provides CISOs the complete picture of risk exposure across the modern adaptive business built on interconnected technology.
Tenable couples breadth of visibility with patented analytics and data science innovations like Predictive Prioritization. This automatically determines vulnerability severity and exploitation likelihood based on threat intelligence and asset criticality.
The company boasts rave reviews from enterprise customers like PayPal, Box and American Express for allowing overworked security teams to focus on what matters most. Tenable co-founder and CEO Amit Yoran has been widely recognized as an industry pioneer.
Forrester Research distinguished Tenable as a leader in the 2020 UVM Wave citing strengths in threat intelligence, identity context and remediation workflow integration.
Key Considerations for Evaluation
With heightened awareness of expanding infrastructure blindspots, interest in automated asset inventory and security monitoring continues to surge.
According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global asset management software market is projected to grow 16% annually reaching $5.2 billion by 2026. IDC predicts worldwide spending on vulnerability management will hit $1.4 billion this year.
As you evaluate options for your environment, seek solutions that:
Provide broad hybrid infrastructure coverage – Can you discover and monitor core data centers, cloud platforms, containers, OT, IoT?
Continuously assess security risks – Does it go beyond basic inventory to detect configuration and policy violations?
Prioritize based on exploitable threats – Will it show the highest likelihood vulnerabilities empowering you to focus remediation?
Simplify deployments & usage – Is it fast to setup, seamlessly adoptable and low maintenance?
Deliver full functionality from SaaS delivery – Will it require on-prem components that complicate scalability?
While still maturing, these cloud solutions mark a seismic shift in how organizations manage and secure exponentially expanding, conjoined IT ecosystems. They allow confidence that your security foundation keeps pace with business transformation.
Adopting automated inventory and monitoring lays the groundwork. To maximize value, integrate these feeds into existing SecOps and IT workflows such as trouble ticketing, change management databases, SIEM analytics and more.
As research firm ESG notes, the top benefit from inventory and monitoring comes from enabling more data-driven decision making. With comprehensive accuracy into the state of assets, you have the foundation to architect risk out of modern dynamic environments.
