Armis Centrix™ for Asset Management and Security

Armis Centrix™ provides robust capabilities to help you secure your network and reduce your attack surface. Key features include:

• Network Threat Detection: Gain full visibility into network-based threats and indicators of compromise.
• Deep Packet Inspection: Visualize network communications between assets to identify risks and inform segmentation policies.
• High-Fidelity Anomaly Detection: Detect network threats with high accuracy by comparing device activity against established “known good” baselines.
• Simplified Network Segmentation: We help you map device communications and provide automated recommendations to create effective segmentation policies, making it faster and easier to reduce the risk of lateral movement.

MASTER NETWORK SECURITY

The Armis Difference is our unique ability to see and secure every asset in your complex environment. Our key differentiators are:

• Complete Asset Coverage: We provide a unified inventory of every managed, unmanaged, and non-traditional asset, including OT, IoT, and medical devices that other tools miss.
• Rapid Time-to-Value: Our agentless approach and hundreds of pre-built integrations mean you can be deployed and operational in a fraction of the time of traditional solutions.
• The AI-Driven Asset Intelligence Engine: This is our giant, crowd-sourced knowledgebase—the largest in the world, tracking billions of assets. It compares your assets’ behavior to “known-good” baselines to provide unparalleled accuracy in device profiling and threat detection.

EXPERIENCE THE ARMIS DIFFERENCE

Our platform is designed for a fast, easy, and non-disruptive deployment.

• SaaS-Based: As a cloud platform, there is no on-premises hardware to install or manage.
• Seamless Integration: It connects with your existing tools without disrupting current operations or workflows.
• Rapid Time-to-Value: Most customers begin seeing a complete asset inventory and actionable insights within minutes to hours, not weeks or months.

SEE HOW QUICKLY YOU CAN GET STARTED

Yes, absolutely. Armis Centrix™ is designed to enhance your existing investments, not replace them.

We provide over 200+ pre-built integrations with the most popular IT, security, and asset management tools, ensuring a seamless fit into your current ecosystem and workflows.

SEE IF WE CONNECT WITH YOUR TOOLS

Our platform provides a holistic, risk-based approach to protecting your environment.

• Intelligent Risk Prioritization: We discover and prioritize all exposures—including CVEs, misconfigurations, and network-based risks—based on their business impact and likelihood of being exploited.
• Holistic Risk Coverage: We identify traditional risks (like unpatched software) as well as network risks (like the use of weak credentials or unencrypted traffic).
• Accurate Threat Detection: We use a combination of signature-based detection for known exploits and behavioral analysis to alert on any suspicious activity that deviates from a device’s normal baseline.

This gives your security teams the context, evidence, and actionable recommendations needed to investigate and remediate risks effectively.

LEARN ABOUT OUR APPROACH

Armis Centrix™ simplifies and automates these critical functions, saving your team time and reducing manual errors.

• Security Gap Analysis: We make it easy to identify gaps in your security controls by mapping your assets and their posture against established frameworks like NIST and CIS.
• Automated Compliance Reporting: Our platform includes out-of-the-box dashboards and reporting templates that you can configure for your specific internal policies or external regulatory requirements, making audit preparation faster and more accurate.

SIMPLIFY YOUR COMPLIANCE STRATEGY

Our platform creates a complete, accurate, and always-on single source of truth for your entire asset inventory. Here’s how the process works:

1. Aggregate Data: We connect to your existing IT and security tools to pull all relevant asset data into one place.
2. Normalize and Deduplicate: We clean up the data, removing duplicate entries and normalizing the information to ensure consistency.
3. Enrich Your CMDB: We push this enriched, accurate data—including user, classification, and location—back to your CMDB, giving you a comprehensive and reliable view of every asset.

This provides your IT and security teams with complete control and allows for standardized reporting from a single, trusted source.

SEE OUR CMDB INTEGRATION IN ACTION

Armis Centrix™ solves the critical challenges that arise from having a complex and fragmented technology environment. It specifically addresses:

• Fragmented Security Views: We break down data silos between your existing security tools to create a single, unified view of your security posture.
• Incomplete Asset Inventories: We resolve issues with incomplete CMDB records, making it easy to answer fundamental questions about what assets you have and how they are secured.
• Weakened Security Controls: By providing a unified view, we enhance your ability to detect threats, identify security gaps, and enforce policies consistently.
• Compliance Burdens: We significantly reduce the manual effort and time required for internal and external compliance reporting for frameworks like NIST and CIS.

LEAN MORE ABOUT SOLVING THESE CHALLENGES

Armis Centrix™ for Asset Management and Security is a platform that gives you a complete, unified inventory of every asset across your entire environment, from your data center to the cloud. It is the single source of truth for your asset inventory and cyber risk exposure.

The platform is designed to help you:

• Discover Every Asset: Automatically find and classify all of your IT, IoT, cloud, and virtual devices, whether they are managed or unmanaged.
• Prioritize Exposures: Identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks based on their likely impact on your business.
• Protect Your Attack Surface: Manage your organization’s cyber risk in real-time to ensure all critical assets are seen, protected, and managed.

Here are six manual and automated network device identification processes:

1. Network scanning tools

Various network discovery tools can help you find all the devices connected to your network. These tools work by sending packets to all IP addresses within a specific range and then determining which devices are active and responding. This active scanning can be disruptive and is known to crash sensitive OT systems and cause unplanned downtime.

2. Network management software

Some enterprise networks use network management software to provide an inventory of all devices on the network, including their assigned IP addresses, MAC addresses, operating systems, and device type.

Learn more about Armis’s network performance analytics

3. Router and switch management interfaces

Routers and switches often have management interfaces that allow administrators to view all connected devices and their IP addresses.
Discover the routers and switches that integrate with Armis

4. DHCP server logs

DHCP servers keep logs of all devices that have requested IP addresses, which can be a useful source of information about all the devices on the network.

5. ARP tables

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is used to map IP addresses to MAC addresses, and ARP tables on network devices can be used to find all the devices connected to the network.

6. Continuous Traffic Inspection

Agentless discovery tools capture network traffic continuously to assess risks and threats in real time. This method gives visibility to devices that cannot accommodate security agents.

IT asset discovery tools automate the identification and cataloging of an organization’s digital assets. These solutions work by gathering information through a combination of network discovery methods (agent-based vs agentless).

IT asset management discovery tools are crucial for modern enterprise cybersecurity, which is marked by an expanding attack surface due to a proliferation of cloud computing, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, and interconnected systems. Operational technology (OT), which used to be isolated in air-gapped networks, has now converged with information technology (IT) systems and introduced new asset visibility and security challenges.

IT/OT convergence playbook for insights on adapting to modern industrial cybersecurity requirements

Enterprises need IT asset discovery as a part of the larger IT asset management (ITAM) process that aims to manage and optimize all assets across the enterprise system. Since you can only secure and optimize what you can see, ITAM always starts with discovering assets and gaining comprehensive network visibility.

IT discovery tools have the following benefits for enterprises:

• Improved security: By understanding all assets within an organization’s network through continuous monitoring, security teams can identify and prioritize potential security risks and vulnerabilities. Asset vulnerability management enables them to implement proactive security measures to protect against cyber threats.
• Increased efficiency: Organizations can use the information provided by asset discovery software to optimize resource allocation, reduce downtime, and improve overall efficiency. For example, an IT asset management system can discover unused software licenses and save business from making unnecessary purchases. These solutions also offer a single source of truth for asset data, helping organizations break down silos that may lead to an incomplete asset inventory.
• Enhanced compliance: IT discovery tools help organizations comply with various regulations and standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by tracking assets and providing audit logs of all their activity.
• Streamlined planning and budgeting: IT asset discovery provides valuable information that organizations can use to plan and budget for future technology initiatives. These tools also help reduce operational costs by discovering overbilled software licenses, underutilized assets, and unauthorized cloud-based resources.

Asset management in cloud computing identifies, assesses, and monitors cloud instances, cloud-based and hybrid virtual machines, and their contents to protect the organization. That seems simple enough, but it’s easy to overlook or underestimate the need for comprehensive cloud asset management in the growing complexity of organizational assets.

Why is cloud asset management such a challenge? Here are some key reasons.

Cloud assets are located outside standard IT networks and, for this reason, can be difficult or impossible to locate and identify with standard, scan-based security tools. If these instances are invisible to security teams, they cannot be monitored or protected from threats, and it’s unlikely that an incident on an undetected cloud asset will generate any sort of alert for the team to respond to.

Unless an organization can find and monitor its cloud assets, much of its data may be at risk. The global share of corporate data in the cloud increased from 30% in 2015 to 50% in 2021, and “85% of enterprises will have a cloud-first principle” by 2025. The shift from on-premises servers to the cloud can save organizations money, increase their agility, and facilitate remote work.

Without visibility for proper management, more cloud adoption means more vulnerabilities and risks. The Identity Management Institute’s list of potential cloud security issues includes intellectual property exposure, compliance violations, malware attacks for data exfiltration, and insider threats that can lead to a cascade of consequences, including:

• Breaches of data confidentiality clauses with clients and partners.
• Denial of service attacks.
• Brand damage, customer churn, and revenue loss.

Reducing these risks requires a security solution that can identify every cloud instance, cloud-based virtual machine, and hybrid cloud-premise asset. Once these assets are identified, they need to be classified by asset type and software. An effective solution will then compare the cloud assets to similar known assets in a device knowledgebase to benchmark appropriate attributes and asset behavior.

Once that data is collected and analyzed, the next step is to monitor the cloud assets to detect changes in behavior. For example, a cloud server holding sensitive data that suddenly starts communicating with an unknown device outside the organization should trigger an alert and policy enforcement to halt data transfer.

Although technical debt is often used in software development, this term can be applied to any technical project.

In IT infrastructure, technical debt is the implied cost of not maintaining technology devices, such as computers, servers, and applications, at a state where the organization and technology landscape requires them to be. These outdated systems and components are also often known as legacy infrastructure.

In cybersecurity, tech debt can build up from poor cyber hygiene practices.

One of the main reasons why a company accrues tech debt is by neglecting or delaying modernization. Organizations that fail to upgrade aging technology and devices can rack up tech debt since legacy software and tools may not be equipped to handle modern speeds and expectations. Since outdated technology is unavoidable, businesses must consider tech debt in their budgets.

Your organization should measure its tech debt because if left unmanaged, it can grow — leading to decreased productivity, increased costs, and cyber risks.

Your team should be performing a complete inventory of their IT and OT infrastructure to better assess devices and application lifespan — and their vulnerabilities, too. Following this assessment, take steps to combat technical debt by replacing outdated equipment before it negatively impacts operations.

Measuring and managing tech debt is crucial to reducing the chance of an attacker exploiting vulnerabilities in your system.

In cybersecurity, technical debt refers to the implied cost of not updating technology assets such as laptops, computers, network components, software, operating systems, and applications, to maintain a minimum working condition and security posture required by the organization based on the current technology and threat landscape.

Tech debt can create vulnerabilities, leading to an increased risk of cyberattacks. Organizations should take action by monitoring their network and measuring their tech debt. Determining the areas where tech debt arises can help increase your security position.

Measuring technical debt is crucial to lowering costs and increasing productivity. Organizations must track asset inventory to get a better understanding of their tech debt. Use these tips below to help control and measure your organization’s tech debt.

1. Evaluate organizational performance – Companies require complete visibility of their physical assets, their lifecycle, and functions. Evaluate company inventory and determine whether or not assets are capable of managing modern applications and if they contain any outdated hardware, software, or OS assets.
2. Manage asset lifecycle — Any end-of-life or near-to end-of-life assets used to support critical business functions may not be taken offline or replaced without severely impacting the organization. It is vital that organizations assess the lifecycle of their assets and create policies to prevent future issues. For example, organizations may require assets to be no more than one or two generations old— a rule that prevents hoarding legacy hardware in the company.
3. Assess security risks — Review assets and their security risk to the organization. This process should include monitoring for unpatchable critical assets, surveilling unmanaged physical assets, and determining whether their network infrastructure depends on equipment in unreachable locations.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the practice of managing and optimizing information technology (IT) assets, such as computers, databases, systems, applications, and networks across an organization.

ITAM includes processes, such as purchasing, auditing, inventorying, and more. IT departments use ITAM to deploy, monitor, track, and maintain software and hardware. For example, it’s a common ITAM practice to assess the lifecycle of devices to determine if and when they should be replaced.

Having a complete (and ideally unified) view of every asset in the IT environment can bring operational efficiencies and better business outcomes. An effective ITAM strategy can help organizations maximize their return on investment (ROI) for technology spending.

The benefits of IT asset management software include:

1. More effective procurement and cost savings
2. Increased cybersecurity and compliance control
3. Improved decision-making thanks to real-time asset visibility

Cybersecurity frameworks and best practices emphasize the importance of asset management because organizations cannot secure the devices and systems they can’t see and monitor. The Center for Internet Security’s CIS Controls, for example, start with a set of Safeguards focused on asset management. CIS Control 1 deals with inventory and control of enterprise assets, while CIS Control 2 targets software assets, such as apps and operating systems.

Dispersed workforces and bring your own device (BYOD) trends increase the cybersecurity asset management challenges for organizations of all sizes. Having more devices connected to the internet expands the attack surface that bad actors could exploit. Digital assets, such as security cameras and wireless keyboards, cannot be managed with traditional IT endpoint security. Complete visibility into unmanaged devices helps minimize risks and vulnerabilities.

A successful ITAM strategy requires a complete, accurate, and constantly updated inventory of all assets—those the IT team knows about as well as those it does not know about. This inventory should include every asset regardless of type or location. That’s why the first step to ITAM is asset discovery.

Armis Centrix™ provides unified asset inventory and management for everything from virtual machines to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and more. It also identifies vulnerabilities and calculates a risk score for each device, helping IT and security teams to prioritize their security efforts.

As industrial control systems, specifically SCADA and DCS systems, become increasingly available to intruders and adversaries, it is time to look at how we secure these critical assets.

Oftentimes, industrial devices are set in networks for decades at a time. It is impossible to predict what tomorrow’s vulnerabilities and risks will look like, and as yesterday’s industrial devices prove, nobody expected vast interconnected networks across plants, countries, and the world, underpinned by a constant threat vector called The Internet. What was once simply a discussion around processes and controls that maximized output and minimized downtime has now come to include cyber threats against a category of devices that were never built to fend off anything other than the typical misconfiguration or broken valve.

So whereas we were once concerned with discrete actions against a machine, from a favored vendor, with proprietary protocols, we are now faced with an ecosystem of devices, from dozens of vendors, that not only need to interconnect and communicate together but do it in such a way that improves efficiencies, reduces downtime, more safely than ever before.

So as these systems and devices become more and more Internet-facing, security requirements have changed. In-depth and detailed monitoring of low-level activities is a must. Why would an advisory bother to learn Modbus when they can leverage a Windows vulnerability in a device that sends commands to a controller running Modbus? They wouldn’t. But the interconnected nature we are now faced with forces us to consider monitoring activities that were once deemed sacred. And these activities reside within our SCADA and DCS systems that control critical processes and machinery.

Are these SCADA and DCS system operating systems? You guessed it…Windows, RTOS, Linux, WindRiver, and all the vulnerabilities that come with them. This means our operations managers now have to bring a full suite of traditional cybersecurity solutions into the mix to mitigate the threats they never thought they would be faced with.

IT asset management (ITAM) is the process of managing and maintaining IT assets, such as devices, applications, networks, and databases. Cybersecurity best practices require organizations to have complete knowledge and visibility over all assets within their network.

A configuration management database (CMDB) stores all asset data related to hardware and software configurable items (CIs) on the network. CIs are included in the ITAM asset inventory.
The two processes are essential aspects of an IT service management (ITSM) strategy.

The risks of a poor IT asset management program include:

• A lack of data to balance costs and determine an asset’s return on investment (ROI).
• Misallocation of resources.
• Gaps in cybersecurity that lead to non-compliance and breaches.
• Lack of operational asset visibility needed to make accurate business decisions.
• Inability to perform preventive maintenance and automated security operations, leading to further wastage of resources.

According to Gartner, 99% of organizations with inaccurate CMDB data quality will face business disruptions. A CMDB is often a trusted source of information for IT managers. If they receive poor-quality data, this trust quickly erodes, leaving them with manual processes and more chances of human error.

In addition, deficient CMDBs may have missing assets or duplicate assets, especially when data is gathered from multiple sources. Asset relationships being poorly recorded leads to a lack of context and an inability to track CIs and their business outcomes. A CMDB that does not keep its data up-to-date may also result in low asset visibility and increased cyber risk.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices is a term to describe hardware assets connected to the Internet that can transmit data with other devices and systems online. We use IoT technology everyday in both our personal and professional lives to increase productivity and efficiency.

IoT devices are often categorized by either Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). CIoT are IoT devices specific for consumer use while IIoT is meant for industrial use. There are so many IoT devices available on the market that it can be difficult to decide which ones can benefit each company. Popular examples of IoT devices include:

• Smart home devices. Amazon Echo and Google Home are common IoT devices in work environments to act as virtual assistants. Once connected to your Wi-Fi, these voice-enabled smart tools use artificial intelligence to control actions such as adjusting lights, controlling office temperature, and even setting meetings.
• Self-driving machinery. John Deere uses automated driving technology to create self-driving tractors that allow workers in the agricultural industry to become more efficient.
• Home security. Smart locks such as August give access to its users based on proximity. Once the August app detects the August smart lock, the user’s door will automatically unlock. Security cameras like Ring are motion-detecting devices that offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for streaming video footage. Rather than greeting outside visitors at the door in the physical world, employees can speak to visitors through the mobile app.
• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The healthcare industry contains IoT devices dedicated explicitly for medical use. Some examples include heart rate monitors to track a patient’s heartbeat, devices for remote patient monitoring, and infusion pumps to measure a patient’s vital signs.

The benefits of IoT devices allow industries in all areas to transform business processes and increase efficiency and effectiveness. There is no surprise to hear that the global IoT market is projected to increase from $478.36 billion in 2022 to $2,465.26 billion by 2029, according to Fortune Business Insights. However, IoT devices focus on connectivity rather than security—making them vulnerable to potential security challenges.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices do everything from streamlining or automating tasks to helping improve usability of an asset to helping organizations automatically track their key performance indicators (KPIs) so they can improve their processes and optimize efficiency. But they also expose businesses to increased cybersecurity risks.

As the number of connected devices grows, so does the attack surface (i.e., all possible points where a breach could happen).

IoT devices have become ubiquitous. IDC forecasts that the number of connected devices worldwide will reach 41.6 billion by 2025. Examples include:

• Security cameras
• Smart thermostats and building management system (BMS) devices
• Sensors in security systems
• Smart TVs
• Smart factory equipment, such as robotic arms
• Scanning devices
• Autonomous farming equipment
• Connected traffic management systems
• Digital assistants

IoT device designs focus on connectivity rather than security. And IoT devices introduce unique asset management and security challenges because these devices are frequently unmanaged.

IoT devices are vulnerable because they:

1. Often lack built-in safeguards
2. Don’t produce logs
3. Can’t be easily updated and patched
4. Don’t support the installation of endpoint agents, making them invisible to traditional security tools

Here are some key steps for increasing  Internet of Things cybersecurity.

1. Empower your workforce with security awareness training, and educate your employees about IoT vulnerabilities and basic cyber hygiene measures.
2. Gain full asset visibility. Invest in a security platform that works with all devices, from managed computers to unmanaged IoT and OT assets. Armis Centrix™ capable of discovering and classifying all devices in your network and air space.
3. Continuously monitor your environment for unusual device and user activity without impacting organizational operations.
4. Adopt industry best practices, such as the Zero Trust security framework and network segmentation. Automated remediation and policy enforcements are critical to limit cyber risk exposure.

Traditional monitoring tools are not suitable to secure IoT devices:

• Scans are disruptive and can lead sensitive devices to crash. For many use cases, including industrial and medical environments, this is a big concern because device malfunction can lead to downtime or life-threatening consequences.

• Traditional network security systems have poor visibility into IoT devices. They cannot see peer-to-peer wireless traffic such as Bluetooth (commonly used by IoT devices). Nor can they see corporate devices connected to rogue networks. They are also unable to track asset behaviors for unusual activity.