Cybersecurity Asset Management Startup Axonius Increases Advisory Board with 3 Industry Experts

Axonius, provider of the first cybersecurity asset management platform to help companies see and secure all devices, today announced that Edna Conway, Hardik Parekh, and Tomasz Chowanski have joined its Advisory Board. As noted cybersecurity and innovation experts, the new additions to its Advisory Board will assist Axonius in further extending its lead as the dominant player in the emerging cybersecurity asset management market.

Edna Conway is the Chief Security Officer at one of the world’s largest information and communications technology companies. In her role Edna is responsible for developing, leading and delivering the company’s strategy to assess, monitor, and continuously improve security and resilience throughout the Global Value Chain, the third party ecosystem involved in the company’s portfolio of over one million solutions.

“Innovative technology can succeed only if built on a foundation of clear asset management,” noted Conway.  “As we move forward at breakneck speed toward digital transformation, a map of the devices in an enterprise’s entire ecosystem, including those of third parties, is a key to enabling meaningful security. Axonius’ approach seeks to ensure the comprehensive asset visibility essential for organizations to improve security with the solutions they already have. I am excited to be involved as an advisor.”

Hardik Parekh is a technology and cloud security executive with a 20-year track record of developing strategy and delivering results, while building and leading highly technical globally distributed security and engineering teams. As part of his role, Hardik has overseen application/product security, security operations, threat and vulnerability management, security architecture, AWS security, and tools development for enterprise, SaaS, mobile and desktop software, hardware and IoT products projects. He is recognized thought leader in security/privacy domain and has published in SANS CWE Top 25, SAFECode, OWASP and BSIMM to name a few.

“As you know, Gartner predicts that by 2020 there will be over 20 billion IoT devices deployed,” said Parekh. “In my professional experience, the massive increase in the number of devices in enterprises is driving the need for a real cybersecurity-focused asset management solution. You can’t protect what you can’t see. The approach of manually identifying and tracking assets is not scalable and it leaves big gaps in asset identification resulting in security gaps. Although Enterprise IT Asset Management tools have been around for a while, they are not geared towards security and automation. And while all of the cybersecurity frameworks stress having a comprehensive asset inventory, I don’t think there is a scalable solution out there other than Axonius that solves the problem. ”

Tomasz Chowanski has been in the information security industry for over 20 years. During his tenure as a senior security leader at GE and in his current role as a CISO for major lines of business at one of the world’s largest banks, he has designed, defined and deployed effective cyber and technology risk mitigation strategies and solutions. He also advises entrepreneurs, senior executives and boards on navigating the cybersecurity landscape, both in legacy and innovative business environments.

“To me, IT asset management is about having complete, accurate, and near real-time visibility into all components of a company’s environment along with all pertinent characteristics of each asset,” said Chowanski. “You can’t manage or secure what you don’t know, and if you don’t know what and where your assets are, how can you ensure that they’re managed efficiently, securely, and compliant?Asset management has always been important, but we are finally coming to the realization that it’s a fundamental issue, and once we solve it systemically, we can realize efficiencies that we’ve been struggling with for a very long time. Axonius is working to answer that need with an innovative approach that holds the promise of solving the IT asset management challenge for cybersecurity.”

“It is exciting and humbling for me to announce Edna, Hardik, and Tomasz as the newest members of our advisory board,” said Dean Sysman, CEO and Co-Founder of Axonius. “We feel like there’s a huge opportunity in cybersecurity asset management, and I believe that the experience and perspective our new advisors bring will help us realize our mission help organizations see and secure all assets.”