Combatting cyberthreats

Fast Company

20-05-2025

When a cybersecurity breach happens, the consequences might seem endless. The immediate business disruption can be accompanied by reputational damage, litigation, intellectual property theft—the list goes on. Unfortunately, many organizations don't even keep track of all the devices, software, and other technology assets they use, much less monitor the specific security threats confronting their fast-growing, multilayered technology infrastructure.
'It's not a question of if, but when these companies will be targeted,' says Dean Sysman, cofounder and CEO of Axonius, a cybersecurity company that's helping businesses keep better track of their technology. The firm's platform allows organizations to see their entire tech stack—all the devices, applications, user accounts, and device authentications—in one place and manage their security from that central location.
This singular focus on helping companies get control of their technology and put a cybershield around their entire business has earned Axonius a spot on Fast Company's 2025 list of the world's Most Innovative Companies.
SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH
The key to Axonius's success is how easily companies can connect existing technology to the firm's platform. In contrast to other cybersecurity solutions, users don't have to add software agents to integrate their systems with Axonius's cybersecurity technology. Not only can those integrations be complicated to manage, but they also can introduce security vulnerabilities.
Once connected, the Axonius Asset Cloud provides users with a wide range of information about security gaps, risks, system inefficiencies, and misconfigurations that make a company's digital assets vulnerable. That comprehensive understanding of an organization's technology and risks helps it proactively prepare for threats that, left unchecked, could cause enormous damage or even shut it down.
For example, Sysman points to one Axonius client, a large media company, that completely avoided disruption from the CrowdStrike IT outage that shut down millions of computers worldwide last year, even though the media company was a heavy user of the affected technology.
FILTERING OUT THE NOISE
Axonius recently introduced Workflows, a platform service that helps users take action against security risks as they emerge. Workflows does more than identify vulnerabilities that need correction. It allows users to solve problems in real time, offering more than 500 enforcement actions that can be activated without inputting any code.
The next evolution of the Axonius Asset Cloud is its recently introduced Exposures product, which goes beyond identifying what technology assets are vulnerable and the kind of risks they're exposed to. Exposures synthesizes those inputs with other data that helps companies better understand which parts of a company's operations are most essential and what the loss of certain technology would mean to company operations. This capability to combine security context, device context, and business context helps businesses filter out less important information and prioritize threats that need immediate attention.
Sysman compares the way his company's platform sifts through data to a crime-scene investigation. 'There are pieces of evidence that are inconclusive until you collect a lot of them and see them overlap in ways that create a clear picture of what's happening,' he says. 'That's exactly what our platform does for security teams. It takes the data from over a thousand different places and shows you what is telling you the truth.'