Black Hat USA 2025 | Ryan Knisley, Axonius

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Ryan Knisley

Chief Product Strategist

Axonius

play_circle_outline Ongoing discussions and interviews about cybersecurity advancements happening at Black Hat 2025.

play_circle_outline Strengthening Healthcare Security: Axonius Acquires Cynerio for Enhanced Asset Management and Protection Measures

play_circle_outline The role of Axonius data in helping customers with cyber risk insurance processes.

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Ryan Knisley, Axonius

Ryan Knisley

Chief Product Strategist Axonius

At Black Hat USA 2025, theCUBE’s Jackie McGuire sits down with Ryan Knisley, former Disney and Costco CISO and now Head of Field CISO at Axonius, to unpack how asset intelligence is evolving in the era of AI-fueled complexity. Knisley shares how Axonius’ 1300+ API integrations are helping security teams move beyond spreadsheets and gain full visibility across cloud, on-prem and IoT environments. Drawing on his own CISO experience, he explains how cyber asset management can eliminate tool sprawl, reduce key-person risk and enable security leaders to “run secur... Read more

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Jackie McGuire

>> Hello CUBE community. Welcome to Black Hat 2025. We are at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Jackie McGuire, your principal analyst and fun media host for security. I am here with one of my favorite guests, Ryan Knisley of Axonius. Ryan, thank you for joining us.

Ryan Knisley

>> Thanks for having me.

Jackie McGuire

>> You are my first guest today. And I was so excited because our conversations are always some of my favorites.

Ryan Knisley

>> I love these. I love these discussions.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah.

Ryan Knisley

>> It's like just talking security with a friend.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah, exactly. And you've got some really big stuff going on at Axonius, so first of all, why don't we start with, give everybody a TLDR of who Axonius is and what you do.

Ryan Knisley

>> We are an asset intelligence company. We have over 1300 APIs that connect into every kind of system and pulls asset intelligence and then correlates that to give practitioners actionable decisions that they can make based off that intelligence. And so, I was a longtime customer. When I decided to leave my role as a CISO, it made complete sense to me to come to this company because I believe in the problem that we're solving and I believe in the technology, the technology is amazing. So that's who Axonius is.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. And you were a CISO at a couple of really small companies that people may not have heard of, like Disney and Costco.

Ryan Knisley

>> Disney and Costco.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah, some really small startups.

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Jackie McGuire

>> So you've got some background to bring into this. And it seems like, with everything developing, I hate to say AI 30 seconds into the first interview, but that's, I think, what a lot of people are here to learn more about because I think a year ago, the attitude was, "Let's just stop it." Security teams were like, "No, put policies in place, block it." But now the horse is out of the barn, so it's like, "Okay, how do we contain this?" So I imagine, with the ability of AI to dramatically spin up services, create data, create assets, that's probably creating a visibility problem for your customers, I would imagine.

Ryan Knisley

>> It absolutely is. There's still so many security organizations out there that manage assets on spreadsheets, databases, things like that. And it's just really challenging. It doesn't scale. And I sort of scratch my head, I'm like, "There's a better way. I know the answer." Business has not slowed down, digital transformation has not slowed down for security teams to catch up. And AI has only exacerbated the problem for security organizations to keep up with technology. So we are seeing this sort of chasm of visibility problems with companies and it's only getting worse.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. So when you were a CISO, you became a customer of Axonius, how did that help with what you were trying to manage, I was joking, obviously, these massive organizations? That's a lot of stuff to see and manage. At Disney, you're talking about copyright and all of these different things where you have these crown jewels that are really, really meaningful.

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah. Highly complex environments, both of them, for different reasons. I used Axonius, honestly. My operational teams, the practitioners, loved it for what it did at its core, which is cyber asset management. I used it to run security like a business. And that's really what I talked to a lot of CISOs about today is, "Hey, use it to run your organization like a business. Meaning, what are the tools that you have? How is your license spend across those tools? Do you have duplicative tools?" So when I brought it in initially, that's the use case that I had for it was, "Help me find all that I have in my environment from a software perspective to start. And let's start to rationalize those." And I tell a great story. I walked into an organization, we had 189 or so security tools, and I go, yeah-

Jackie McGuire

>> "That's it?"

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah, that's it. And-

Jackie McGuire

>> And a person paid to manage every one of those, right?

Ryan Knisley

>> A person paid to manage every one. And this came to a head when my team came to me and said, "Hey, we have a problem because Sarah wants to go on vacation." I'm like, "Well, what's the problem with Sarah going on vacation?" "Well, she's the only admin for one of the five EDR tools that we have in our environment." And so, it made me pause and just think about, "What are we doing?"

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah.

Ryan Knisley

>> Like this-

Jackie McGuire

>> The key person risk of like, "What if she gets hit by a bus?"

Ryan Knisley

>> We talk about resiliency, but we're not thinking about people resiliency. And so, I said, "Time out. Let's really be thoughtful about the tools that we have." And Axonius is the platform that we use to discover all of these tools and then make decisions to rationalize them. So that was how I became introduced to Axonius five or so years ago as a customer.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. And then you recently made an acquisition, speaking of very complex environments. So one of the things you and I bonded over was actually personal stuff, was health issues, for you, it was your spouse, for me, it was myself, and kind of how complex healthcare is, and kind of some of our concerns now that we're mired in this system about data, and you go to the hospital, and you see all of these connected devices, and all of these assets, and 15 different people needing to log into the same endpoints. So talk a little bit about this. Tell us about the company you acquired and why healthcare is one of the places that is in most dire need of these services.

Ryan Knisley

>> We acquired a company called Cynerio, who's built an amazing capability across healthcare. The reason we made the acquisition was our customers really told us this is what they wanted next for Axonius, is they felt this was a huge opportunity to improve the quality of security within healthcare. Honestly, we discussed this a little bit before we started here, and I feel like this is one of the most, if not the most targeted aspect within industry, and it's probably the most underserved. And so, Axonius, because of the incredible platform that we've built, it's really a natural fit for us to then expand into the IoT, OT, med device environment because it is such critical infrastructure for our country.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. And there's a lot of things going on. I mean, it's kind of, in healthcare, you have haves and have-nots, right?

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah.

Jackie McGuire

>> So you have these massive, like Kaiser-type systems, but then you have these tiny little community hospitals. And sometimes, these things, in rural areas, are the only hospital within 100, 150 miles. And those are, often, the organizations with the least ability to protect themselves. And they've got equipment that's 20 years old, sometimes, trying to interact with new equipment. And so, I imagine that asset management becomes extremely critical in terms of if I'm going to breach somewhere and try to get my hands on a whole bunch of very sensitive data that I can leverage that. Because I think when we think healthcare, we think, oh, your doctor, but healthcare includes things like addiction services, mental health services, like some very, very sensitive data about people. And then, we have this whole population of baby boomers who's going to be moving through the healthcare system as they age and really, really straining this technology. So how do you see this progressing? And with this acquisition, what do you hope to bring together between Axonius and Cynerio to really create a cohesive environment around these healthcare providers?

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah. And I agree to your point that the issue is only getting worse, it's only getting bigger, I would say, as more people enter the healthcare system and more technology and devices come online within healthcare. The way we see it is we want to be the premier asset intelligence company regardless of what that asset is. And med device assets are equally as important as servers and laptops that are in an enterprise environment. And so, we want to service our customers holistically regardless of what they have in their environment. And so that was really how we thought healthcare was the best entry point to do that.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. One of the things I've always said is that I think one of the things that's going to happen is we're going to start looking at data more like an asset from almost like a security standpoint because not all data is created equal. And so, a piece of data in a retail store might not be that sensitive, but in a hospital environment, might be extremely insensitive. And so, I've kind of, from a cyber risk insurance standpoint, started to look at, well, how do you really ensure this data because the loss of PII is different than the loss of VPC logs? And my kind of working theory has been that, eventually, insurers are going to have to start looking at the actual data and what's in it. I imagine, and I know that when you go to underwrite cyber risk insurance, being able to compile that inventory and show that you actually know what's going on in your environment, you actually understand what you have is extremely important. Have you seen that with your customers in terms of when they're trying to talk to cyber risk insurers and trying to get reinsurance, if they are able to say, "Hey, we really know what's going on in our environment, we're using Axonius"? Is that beneficial to them in that process?

Ryan Knisley

>> Absolutely. Yeah, it absolutely has been. We've heard from customers where they're using Axonius intelligence reports for cyber insurance to sort of hand it over to cyber insurers and really help drive down costs. And I think cyber insurers, at the same time, are educating themselves to say, "Hey, do you have Axonius? If so, can we see the Axonius data?" And so, it's a bit double-edged.

Jackie McGuire

>> That's a nice pipeline.

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah, it's a bit double-edged, but we are absolutely seeing that from customers and hearing that feedback with regards to acting with cyber insurers.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. So I'm going to steal my colleague, Savannah, one of her best questions, I'm going to steal it, but give her credit for it. Hi Savannah. We're going to sit down in a year. I'm going to make you come back. We're going to talk again at Black Hat. What do you hope to be able to say about Axonius in a year when we sit down? What do you hope to be able to say that you've accomplished in this year and where you're going to be at in Black Hat 2026?

Ryan Knisley

>> I think first and foremost, that we have continued to serve our customers at a really high level. That we delight our customers. Our customers really love us. And I was a customer, I know, if you talk to our customers, they're thrilled with the value that Axonius delivers. I would say we really want to get our healthcare capability integrated into the platform and have full asset intelligence across both network and on-prem and cloud. And I think continue to build just an amazing company for our people, for our employees. We have a very strong culture, it's people first. And I want to make sure that this is a top destination for cyber talent to work.

Jackie McGuire

>> Nice. So I actually have spoken with a few of your customers at RSA. We had Liz Morton come on, and she brought Luis Valenzuela, and he's... Is it Picom? And he spoke very highly of you. They have, obviously, a very complex environment. So yeah, I will vouch that every customer I've spoken to of Axonius is super happy, I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it. So I have no doubt that you'll be able to say that next year. I guess last question, since you've been a CISO, I'm asking many of the customers I have who've been CISOs, if you're a CISO today and you're just absolutely overwhelmed, you're like, "All of a sudden, we're responsible for agents and non-human identities and access and people are just spinning up S3..." You're like, "Okay, I'm going to deploy Axonius. I'm going to get my inventory." What is generally the low-hanging fruit? What's like the first two things you should be doing as a CISO right now to really get your hands around the rate of change in the enterprise?

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah. First-

Jackie McGuire

>> I know there's no magic answer because it's different between... but from your previous experience.

Ryan Knisley

>> The reason I'm so passionate about what I get to do now and the company that I work for is because I saw what it did for my organizations, for the teams that I led, truly transformational capability they provided. For me, asset intelligence, just visibility is foundational. And I'll say this a lot of times when I speak to security teams or groups or leaders, even the non-technical stakeholders in your company, whether they're the C-suite executives or board members, they understand the old adage, "You can't protect what you don't know about." And they ask about that, right, they're like, "What do we not know about?" You've got to be able to answer those questions. And so at its basic, just having visibility into everything that's in your environment is, to me, the most important thing you can do as a leader, as a security organization. And so, to do that, inventory the data, rationalize the data, and then start to monitor and get better at, "Where are we missing our security stack? What are we going to do about it?" It's like three basic questions that I used to ask. "What do we have? What's on it? And if something's not on it that we want on it, how are we going to fix that?" Those are the three things. And I'm a very simplistic person, but that was the approach I always took to mature organizations.

Jackie McGuire

>> Well, I mean, being simple, the vast majority of incidents we see is like basic cyber hygiene, just like the most basic cyber hygiene. So I think, a lot of times, we do need to go back to the basics. And I'm also of the opinion that even the non-technical people in your organization should be educated about data, the types of data they handle, why it's sensitive. And I think, sometimes, in security, we don't do a great job of making the information that we think about and handle accessible to the non-technical employees in the org. So I'm mostly going to say that that I think you can trust your non-technical employees to understand types of data and why they're important and how to spot data where it shouldn't be.

Ryan Knisley

>> And I think your business executives too. The approach I took was I would share the risk out and make it a business problem. "This isn't a cybersecurity problem or an IT problem, this is a business issue and we all should be informed on this risk and we can make decisions as a leadership team on it." And so I think sharing widely across stakeholder groups is hugely important.

Jackie McGuire

>> As a business owner, right?

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah, as a business owner.

Jackie McGuire

>> Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ryan.

Ryan Knisley

>> Thanks for having me.

Jackie McGuire

>> I wish we had... I could talk to you for an hour. We'll have to bring you back. I get to talk to Liz later, so I'm super excited about that. But thank you so much. I guess, shout out, what do you have going on at Black Hat this year? Anything that you want people to come see, you've got a booth, so we should send them your way?

Ryan Knisley

>> Come down to our booth, see us at our booth. We have lightsabers, we've got a-

Jackie McGuire

>> Lightsabers?

Ryan Knisley

>> Yes.

Jackie McGuire

>> When do we get lightsabers?

Ryan Knisley

>> Yeah, I think they're decoration, but we have an amazing giveaway raffle prize this year. If you're into Legos, you're going to want to see this one.

Jackie McGuire

>> Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us.

Ryan Knisley

>> All right, thanks.

Jackie McGuire

>> And for theCUBE, I'm Jackie McGuire, from Las Vegas, Nevada for Black Hat 2025. Stay tuned, we've got lots more great interviews coming your way.