What is Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)?

Understanding CAASM

Cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) is a security practice that gives teams unified visibility and control over all enterprise assets—cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and beyond. It helps eliminate blind spots and reduce risk by correlating asset data from across your environment and tools. CAASM enables teams to query, prioritize, and act from a single source of truth.

The goal? Minimizing risk and simplifying remediation by enabling security teams to see, query, and act on all assets—including cloud resources, AI workflows, SaaS tools, networks, human/machine identities, and shadow IT—from a single pane.

CAASM automates asset discovery by integrating with leading cloud provider APIs (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) to deliver real-time mapping of resources. For instance, it dynamically detects ephemeral compute instances and serverless functions, correlates these findings with vulnerability scans, and automatically updates risk analyses. This automation minimizes manual efforts and enhances the accuracy of asset inventories and associated risk contexts.

The Cloud Visibility Playbook: 10 Practices to Secure Cloud Environments

Learn what makes Wiz the platform to enable your cloud security operation

Why is CAASM critical for cloud-first organizations?

CAASM is important for cloud-first organizations because it fills the need for a dynamic, centralized, and queryable inventory. With this functionality, CAASM provides comprehensive asset visibility, reduces shadow IT, and supercharges issue detection.

The top 5 reasons cloud-first organizations should consider adopting CAASM are:

Cloud complexity: Visibility gaps and misconfigurations are common due to the cloud’s complex and ephemeral nature. CAASM simplifies things by providing real-time inventories, correlating assets, and contextualizing misconfigurations.
Hybrid infrastructure: Hybrid setups can be challenging because they integrate technologies across multiple stacks. CAASM maps these varied technologies and their relationships in real time, providing SecOps teams with a solid foundation for secure asset management.
Identity sprawl: CAASM uncovers all identities and the assets they have access to. Then it proactively addresses risks stemming from access privileges and shadow identities.
Ephemeral asset management: CAASM dynamically adjusts to the cloud’s short-lived resources, reducing the risks associated with ephemeral containers, functions, and temporary roles.
Tool fragmentation: Security tools are often siloed, with EDRs, CNAPPs, and the like working separately. The problem is, siloed tools lead to visibility gaps. By normalizing data across the tools, CAASM eliminates blind spots.

Common CAASM use cases

Organizations typically apply CAASM for:

Shadow asset discovery: Finding unmanaged or untagged cloud resources like abandoned test environments, orphaned storage buckets, and unassociated elastic IPs
Exposure analysis: Discovering all internet-facing assets and exposures like hardcoded secrets, open ports, and storage buckets with public access
Security control validation: Verifying that no asset has weak encryption, authentication, or access controls and that logging, threat detection, and exposure management are enabled for all assets
Cloud identity sprawl analysis: Identifying overpermissioned and orphaned identities, especially when paired with CIEM
Audit and compliance reporting: Detecting drift, mapping configurations to compliance requirements, and generating compliance reports

Detect active cloud threats

Learn how Wiz Defend detects active threats using runtime signals and cloud context—so you can respond faster and with precision.

CAASM in action: A cloud-centric example

Let’s walk through how CAASM enables faster risk reduction by tying together context across your cloud and security stack.

Step 1: Discover orphaned assets

Your security team wants to identify unused resources. With CAASM integrated across your cloud, SaaS, and security tools, they run a simple query:

Find all orphaned VMs.

The query returns several results, including staging VMs that were left running after a testing cycle.

Step 2: Add identity context

To assess risk, the team runs a follow-up query:

Find all VMs with overly permissive service accounts.

This uncovers several orphaned VMs with admin-level service accounts attached—representing potential attack paths.

Step 3: Prioritize with business context

CAASM correlates these findings with IAM, data, and network exposure details. It highlights which VMs have access to sensitive data or are internet-exposed—surfacing the most critical risks first.

Step 4: Trigger remediation workflows

From the CAASM platform, the team pushes prioritized issues into Jira with owner attribution, severity labels, and remediation guidance. Developers can immediately take action with full context.

Outcome

What would’ve taken days of manual correlation is now handled in minutes. CAASM reduces risk exposure, eliminates blind spots, and accelerates remediation by giving your team the context they need—fast.

What to look for in a CAASM solution

As a prospective CAASM buyer, you must verify that your potential CAASM solution offers the security functionalities you need. Core offerings to look out for include:

Breadth of integrations: Check support for cloud, SaaS, and on-premises solutions; you want to ensure no resources go unmonitored because untracked resources translate to unmanaged risks.
Normalization and deduplication logic: This functionality allows CAASM solutions to reconcile conflicting identifiers used for the same assets or risks across siloed tools as the same. This minimizes duplicate findings, false positives, and alert fatigue.
Depth of context: Deep contextualization across all IT assets, vulnerabilities, identities, and exposures is critical to boost detection accuracy and facilitate prioritization.
Query and automation capabilities: Verify that teams can run custom queries for varied contexts and incidents, use simple query methods, and automate remediation of repetitive issues. Custom queries will allow teams to easily dig into context-specific risks, simplified querying will democratize security Ops, and automation will shorten the attack window.
Scalability and performance: Choose a CAASM platform that’s designed for large-scale environments, ensuring it does not choke or underperform as IT assets increase.

Flexibility: Select a tool that integrates resources in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. A tool with this flexibility will facilitate consistent resource labeling, configurations, IAM policies, and more across the board.

How CAASM fits into your cloud security stack

CAASM doesn’t replace tools like CSPM, DSPM, or CIEM—it amplifies their value. By enriching their outputs with context and correlation, CAASM acts as a connective layer across your entire security stack.

It’s especially powerful when paired with a CNAPP. A well-integrated CNAPP already unifies visibility and context across assets, identities, data, and workloads. CAASM complements that by:

Enriching posture tools with context like ownership, exploitability, and toxic combinations
Normalizing findings across siloed tools so teams work from one source of truth
Accelerating investigation and remediation with custom queries and real-time views

Wiz delivers these CAASM-like benefits natively. The Wiz Security Graph brings together cloud resources, identity, and runtime context, mapping full attack paths so teams can prioritize and act without stitching tools together.

Want to see it in action? Request a demo of Wiz and explore the most advanced CNAPP + CAASM capabilities—all in one platform.

Frequently asked questions

How does CAASM stack up against traditional CMDBs?

CAASM automates and dynamically updates asset inventories and risk analyses, which is critical for ephemeral resources. Traditional configuration management databases (CMDBs) maintain static inventories of enterprise assets, often updated hourly or daily. CMDBs lack real-time risk or exposure context.

What’s the difference between CAASM and vulnerability management?

CAASM begins with comprehensive asset discovery—including shadow and unmanaged assets—then correlates findings from vulnerability scanners and other tools to provide enriched context for faster prioritization and remediation.

Vulnerability management identifies, assesses, prioritizes, and fixes security flaws in enterprise assets.

How does CAASM compare to CSPM and CNAPP platforms?

CAASM provides unified cyber asset visibility; it surfaces and contextualizes issues from varied platforms like CNAPP, EDR, and IAM tools.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) secures cloud environments by finding and resolving cloud misconfigurations and other cloud risks.

Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) consolidate cloud security from build to runtime and across cloud, IaC, data, runtime, workloads, and more.

Wiz Akademie

The Top 5 CNAPP benefits you need to know in 2025

A CNAPP, or Cloud Native Application Protection Platform, is an integrated security solution that unifies multiple cloud security capabilities—like CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, and IaC scanning—into a single platform.

How are CAASM and EASM different?

CAASM visualizes and correlates issues in an organization’s entire set of digital assets, both external and internal. External attack surface management (EASM) identifies and mitigates risks in external assets, especially internet-facing resources and other assets vulnerable to attacks from outside the organization.

What about CAASM vs. ASM?

CAASM gathers insights from multiple assets and security tools to contextualize findings and streamline ASM.
Attack surface management (ASM) detects and resolves security flaws in an organization’s entire attack surface.

What’s the bottom line?

CAASM doesn’t replace any of these frameworks. Rather, it enhances them by correlating their findings, enriching risk management with context and generally reducing silos.

Main takeaways from this article: