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Dean Sysman

CEO & Co-Founder

Axonius

From shadow IT to singular truth: Axonius reshapes cybersecurity visibility

Fragmentation isn’t just a technical issue in cybersecurity — it’s an existential one. Shadow IT, software-as-a-service sprawl and disconnected tools leave teams squinting at their environments through fractured lenses, with no clear cybersecurity visibility into what’s safe or exposed.Axonius’ Dean Sysman talks with theCUBE during Axonius Adapt25.“That’s led to dozens of different tools that organizations need to use, and each one only sees a part of the picture, a part of the one piece of that puzzle of the organization,” said Dean Sysman (pictured), co-founder and chief executive offer of Axonius Inc

play_circle_outline Axonius' focus on providing comprehensive visibility and unified truth about assets

play_circle_outline Introduction of exposure management and identity governance features based on customer feedback

play_circle_outline Rising use of AI applications and non-human identities, leading to increased risks

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Dean Sysman, Axonius

Dean Sysman

CEO & Co-Founder Axonius

Dean Sysman, the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Axonius, joins theCUBE at Axonius Adapt 2025, held in Dallas, Texas. During this inaugural event, Sysman provides an in-depth analysis of current cybersecurity challenges and insights into Axonius' innovative solutions for asset management, emphasizing the importance of actionability.

In this exclusive interview, Sysman explores the complexities of cybersecurity, identifying fragmentation as a critical challenge for security teams. Sysman explains how Axonius addresses these issues with a dis... Read more

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What motivated the creation of cyber asset management and how does it help organizations in understanding their devices better? add

What new feature was announced today and why is it important for exposure management and identity governance in organizations? add

What are some challenges organizations are facing with the increasing use of AI applications and non-human identities within their infrastructure? add

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Dean Sysman, Axonius

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello, everyone, in CUBE Nation. Welcome to Axonius Adapt here in Dallas, Texas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my cohost and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, this is so exciting. It's the first ever, the inaugural Axonius Adapt.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I mean, the energy has been wonderful being in Dallas and really a great location at Gilley's here that just has a lot of history to it. And I think also the brain power, and the security brain power in particular, that was in the room for the keynotes this morning, unbelievable.

Rebecca Knight

>> Along with the Cowboys drumline.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> I should mention that too.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. And the funny comment that our next guest will have about the Eagles and even for the Eagles fans being okay with it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, let us introduce our next guest. He is the CEO and co-founder of this company, Dean Sysman. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Dean.

Dean Sysman

>> Of course. Great to have a conversation with you today. Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So before we get to your strategic vision of where you're going, where you're taking this company, why don't you set the scene for our viewers now and just talk a little bit about the state of cybersecurity today as you see it?

Dean Sysman

>> Sure. So I think the word that everybody would agree to best summarizes the challenges that security teams are facing today is fragmentation. They have a lot of different parts of their environment, with move to the cloud, IoT, people using their personal devices to do work from anywhere, just the amount of form factors that organizations have. That's led to dozens of different tools that organizations need to use. And each one only sees a part of the picture, a part of the one piece of that puzzle of the organization, and it's led to a lot of fragmentation for security teams that they're trying to manage and be able to secure their environments.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I look at it having been at a cloud provider and having been on the IT side even a little bit longer ago. Everybody's inundated with information and data and logs and traces and all these different metrics and stuff like that. It seems like what you guys are doing with AssetCloud and really focusing on this, kind of help people understand why AssetCloud and why Axonius went down this direction. Because I think, again, you had a good story about that on the main stage there as well.

Dean Sysman

>> Yeah, so when we started it was because we talked to as many organizations as we could, and they all told us that even an understanding of what devices they have in their mind is something that is very challenging for them to know because of the fragmentation of so many different tools, data silos, and get a singular answer over anything was something that they couldn't do. And that's where we started and we created what we called cyber asset management, which is how do we connect to all the existing tools an organization has and then be able to correlate, aggregate, deduplicate all that data together and then give them a singular truth, a singular answer over what they have. And that's expanded more and more over time. And as I talked about on stage, today we have over 1200 different adapters of products that we know how to integrate with. When we go to a customer environment, we'll be able to pull in all the data of what they have and we'll be able to identify over 40 different kinds of assets that they can have. So it's not just devices, it's identities and it's applications, and it's a network and it's files and web and all those different things. But then most importantly, what we're talking about today is how much everyone wants to get to the next level, and that is to take action on that truth.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I thought it was great in that, and just to dig in a little bit, because I thought some of the numbers that you shared there, the 300% growth in SaaS applications, which makes a lot of sense. People don't want to necessarily build everything themselves, build what's core to your organization. But you also have just such a huge adapter network. That has to be one of the advantages you bring to your customers and to those organizations.

Dean Sysman

>> Exactly. And the way we got to that was because we tried to understand what's the way to solve the problem of giving comprehensive visibility and not just giving yet another data silo, yet another, here's a part of the puzzle, here's a piece of the puzzle. We really set out to say how do we solve this problem in a way that gets us as close to a hundred percent visibility as realistically possible? And the approach is very different than anything that's happened before. Other solutions, and this is what most organizations do today or have done in the past, is they try and scan their network or they try and rely on a certain agent that they have installed. And those are all great data sources, but they're only seeing what they're seeing, right? They're not seeing the full picture. And just like the analogy I gave on stage, when a crime scene investigator tried to understand what happened in a crime scene, they're not only relying on one piece of evidence or one witness. The way to get to the truth is by getting as many pieces of data, as many views, as many witnesses, as many pieces of evidence, and then the overlap between them is the truth, because there's always noise in the signals. There's always things that you have to validate and normalize. And the technology that we built is using those 1200+ adapters to be able to tell you the truth regardless of what noise you have in your data, regardless of what tools you had. And the way we got to it is because organizations kept telling us, "Here are the tools we have, here's how we want to see the result, here's how we consider the truth in our environment." And we've gotten to the point of being able to tell that better than any other platform in the world, because that was our focus in building up to that level.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you're able to tell the truth, give much clearer visibility. And then you said on the main stage, "We're starting a movement, and that movement is actionability," and it's being able to see that truth and then be able to extract insights and then prioritize what needs to be done. Can you tell us a little bit more about this movement that you're starting at Axonius?

Dean Sysman

>> Of course, of course. So once you've gotten visibility, you see things you want to change. You see misconfigurations you want to adjust, you see vulnerabilities you want to remediate. You see, for example, one of the things that we see a lot in SaaS is wasted spend. We see people, every organization that we go into for the first time, they realize, oh, we've wasted a lot of money on licenses we're not using or on duplicative tools that we know we can consolidate around. And they don't have that visibility. But once you get that for both operations, cost savings, and obviously risk, the next thing you want is to take action. And what's preventing people from taking action most of the time is not a lack of capability. It's not that I'm lacking a tool or I don't know how to change that configuration, or I don't know how to upgrade that or patch that software in order to mitigate that vulnerability. The problem is taking the action requires a lot of knowledge around what's going to be the impact. If I have a million vulnerabilities in my environment, I'm not just going to upgrade everything and patch everything because I'm probably going to make a lot of stuff stop working, and I'm never going to figure out what that is. So the starting point to understand what action to take is not only what is the problem, but also understanding the impact, and to understand the impact you need the entire envelope of business context around that. For example, is that server that I want to patch so it doesn't have a vulnerability, what is that server doing? Is it a test machine in some lab somewhere? Fine, we can patch it. Or is this the payment server that we have running in our production and it's probably one of the most important things in our entire environment, and I can't even risk that thing coming down? Even if I determine I want to patch that, who's the person that owns that process? Who do I create the ticket for? Or who's the person who's going to be managing the business continuity that needs to happen in order to be able to do that? Do we spin up another server? All of those factors are what's required to take action. And I think every organization, every security and IT teams, what they're struggling with is not the capability of taking action. It's the truth that they need to have in order to feel confident to be able to do that. And through our platform, because we correlate all that data, we help you see the truth and then divert the right action that you already have probably in one of your existing tools.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I loved how you tied that together with the GA announcements that you have coming out in April with exposures and identities. Why don't you talk to how those two feature sets came to be? Because I think, again, you had an interesting story around the customers and how they drove you there, and I think that really makes a lot of sense.

Dean Sysman

>> Yeah. So first of all, we live for the outcomes that our customers get. Our North Star is always our customers' outcomes, and ours will be the result of that, rather than the other way around. And I mentioned on stage, we had some amazing stories of a public school system finding missing children through the platform. We've had healthcare organizations be able to provide care for people even during crises because of the platform. We've had public sector organizations tell us that they've been able to protect their community or the mission behind them because of our platform. So we're always inspired and humbled by what we provide to them. And the way to get there is to listen to what they're telling us they need. So once we grew into solving the visibility problem better than anybody, what we realized was we have a unique view into what they have, and we also have unique access to their tools. We're the only thing that is the glue between all the different tools they have and the understanding of what each tool provides in terms of information. Well, what are the capabilities that you can drive and orchestrate in those tools? And then they start to ask us, "Hey, can you help us in these other categories, these other areas that we didn't place a flag in? We didn't say we solved those problems. We said we're cyber asset management, we help you get visibility. And there are these other tools that help to solve it." But then they explain to us in so many other problem spaces within cybersecurity and within IT, the problem is not the capability itself, it's that we need the truth in order to be able to take the action. So the first thing that we announced today is exposure management, which means it's not just about just the assets, it's also about the vulnerabilities that they have, understanding all their vulnerabilities, and then also understanding exposure at large. Meaning, is this thing exposed to the internet? What kind of service publicly on the internet is it doing for us? Again, is it that payment server or is that just some random machine in the lab somewhere that nobody can access? Those are very different things from a risk perspective. And also, who's the person in charge of fixing that vulnerability? So taking all the exposure, all the vulnerabilities, all the misconfigurations from all the different sources, and then based on their business context, being able to prioritize them or rank them or understand the risk behind them, that's what people call exposure management. They told us, "You are the only platform that has all the capability and all the data access in order to be able to do this the way we want." So we heard them, and that's why we launched exposure management and moved into that direction. And it's the same thing for identities. Just like we're talking about devices and vulnerabilities, identities are a huge part of what a security team and IT team needs to do today to support their business. And we call this the joiner, mover, leaver. When people join an organization, they move to different roles, and they leave, you have to make sure that they have the right access. And when I ask people, "When you start your current job, did you have access to everything you needed on the first day," nobody raises their hand. Because that's a thing that we've all gotten accustomed to. But then you ask yourself why? Why does it take weeks or months until I actually get the access to what I need? And it's because it's an incredibly difficult problem to make sure that a person has the right Slack channels that they've joined and the right Dropbox folder that they have access to, and they have the right account provision, the right SaaS apps. Those are all very fragmented silos that the only way to control in an overarching way is, again, you have to be connected to all of them and understand them. So our platform also made a lot of our customers tell us this whole problem around identity security, identity governance is stuff that's never really been solved well because there was no integration layer between everything that allows us to do it. And we already have customers of both products today that are talking about on stage, and we're going to be releasing a lot more information, as well, about how they see this as a very differentiated way compared to how people have done it until now.

Rob Strechay

>> I think one of the things, and I gave you credit for being one of the few keynotes I've been to in the past year that didn't mention AI on stage, but AI and being able to have the identity and all this attack surface around AI, because AI has now become this big data warehouse of really potentially PII or really a company's IP. Do you see that as a place that you're being driven to by your customers as well, as they say, "Hey, we got this new shiny object over here. We need to get all of those signals in as well."

Dean Sysman

>> Of course. So like we talked about, we're seeing an acceleration explosion of use of applications in organizations. And among them, a lot of those are AI applications. We're seeing a lot of, and we're going to be sharing more of that information going forward, which would be really interesting, what we're seeing. But there's definitely an explosion of AI usage. And what we are seeing is that every organization, very similar to how SaaS applications or cloud providers are, you have your managed core sort of AI offerings that an organization uses as a foundation for themselves and they manage it. They have visibility over risk. But then you have a lot of people internally in the company starting to use stuff that nobody knows about. You have this one-off person using DeepSeek, or you have this one-off person using Gemini instead of ChatGPT because it's just easy. It's just there. And they're sharing the company information, they're sharing a lot of things that if you don't have visibility into you, you'll never be able to secure. And that's also continued that trend of fragmentation that we've been talking about. And I think with the more automation and agentic AI that's coming on board, there is also everybody's forecasting an explosion of identities as well. Like now, every single AI action could be an identity of itself. We've seen that all the way to the present with service accounts, with non-human identities. Today, non-human identities are a multiple of the amount of the same human identities an organization has. And that's going to only increase. And most of the time, non-human identities have actually more permissions and more access than a human one, because their whole goal is to be able to change things and cause action within the infrastructure. So we think the ability to have a view of all your identities, being able to understand what kind of access they have, is incredibly important the more of AI usage you have, because otherwise, you're just going to be blind to the risks and blind to also the efficacy. Are those things doing the right things for us or not? And we've obviously also utilized a lot of AI in our own platform. But again, AI is a tool to achieve the goal that you're looking for, the outcome you're looking for. And to us, the most important part is the trust and the confidence that people get from the truth in our platform. And that comes from deterministic algorithms, right? We don't want to have an AI tell you what's in your environment. We want a hundred percent bulletproof, here is the right answer of what's happening in your environment today.

Rebecca Knight

>> And I know that that is something you were actually talking to our colleague about, John Furrier at the . We're here at the first ever Axonius Adapt, the first of many, I'm sure. Looking forward, this is an eight-year-old company, relatively new in the grand scheme of things. What is next for Axonius?

Dean Sysman

>> Yeah. So we announced about a year ago that we passed a hundred million ARR. We're seeing a very interesting thing in the market right now. We heard the news about the acquisition of , which is the biggest VC funded private acquisition ever happening from a cybersecurity Israeli founded company. And I think there are a few other, just like us, what we call pre-IPO companies at the stage of we're definitely a startup in spirit, but we have hundreds of customers. We have hundreds of millions of annual recurring revenue, and we're trying to understand what's the right timing for us to become a public company and become one of the leaders of the security industry going forward. And I think what we announced today shows people that the platform we've built, our moat, which is all those adapters, the correlation algorithm that knows how to tie data from billions of assets and millions of networks and environments, all the way from the DOD with the largest scale imaginable, all the way down to the smallest startup and everything in between, that platform not only gives us the ability to solve problems where we started in chasm, but also now in all these incumbent large categories like exposure management, like identity governance, or identity threat detection and response. And we're going to continue to see where our customers are telling us that our platform can solve things in a very differentiated, unique way to them than anything else that's out there available.

Rebecca Knight

>> I like the vision, customer driven vision. Excellent. Dean Sysman, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations.

Dean Sysman

>> Thank you very much.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Rob Stretchay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of Axonius Adapt. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and coverage.