Solve it with Gotham’s Axonius-Powered Managed Services.
Most cybersecurity incidents don’t start with a sophisticated zero-day exploit or brute force intrusion. They are usually rooted in something more mundane: an asset no one knew existed—or an asset assumed to be secure that hasn’t been patched or updated in months.
Maybe it’s a server spun up for a project last year and forgotten. Or a SaaS app quietly adopted by a single department, unaccounted for by your security team. Or a service account created long ago with wide-open privileges. These examples aren’t edge cases; they’re predictable byproducts of modern IT.
As technology environments sprawl across cloud, SaaS, remote endpoints, and identities, traditional asset management breaks down. Static inventories, manually maintained configuration management databases (CMDBs), and siloed security tools fall behind the pace of change. Even for teams using industry-leading attack surface management platforms, day-to-day operations can be a significant challenge: maintaining functional integrations, curating quality data, translating findings into actionable steps, and validating outcomes.
Gotham closes this gap with our Asset Management as a Service offering, powered by Axonius. It’s a service model built to deliver continuous, decision-grade attack surface management with ongoing governance and automation that can identify blind spots in your environment before they can lead to detrimental cyber incidents.
The Asset Visibility Problem – Repairing a Broken Operating Model
Security teams know asset visibility is integral to an organization’s overall security fabric. You may have heard the mantra, “you can’t secure what you don’t know about.” But in 2026, the challenge isn’t solely asset discovery, it’s maintaining an always-current, reconciled truth across hundreds of systems with thousands (or tens of thousands) of incongruous assets.
Typically, today’s organizations manage:
- On-prem and cloud infrastructures
- Laptops, mobile devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices
- Human and non-human identities
- Hundreds of SaaS applications
- Ephemeral workloads that exist for mere minutes
Each of these assets may be “known” by one or more tools, but no single system sees the 100% full picture. Endpoint tools have visibility of endpoints. Identity Access Management (IAM) tools see users. Cloud security tools see cloud accounts, resource usage, and availability. No single tool can see everything in a modern IT environment, and none were designed to reconcile reality when disparate systems provide conflicting data.
Despite their limitations, asset visibility tools are incredibly useful for reducing attack surfaces. Still, top-tier platforms can be ineffective if operations aren’t in line. And beyond threat actors taking advantage—blind spots can impact issue response timelines, extend outages, and lead to failed audits.
That’s No Moon
The Death Star is an apt analogy for modern cyber risk. The Empire believes it is invincible – and why wouldn’t they? It can deploy fleets of Tie Fighters, pull ships into its destructive range with a tractor beam, and there’s a dark wizard living on it that can shoot lightning from his fingertips.
But with all its vast resources, the Empire failed to account for a devastating weakness – an exhaust port identified by the Rebel Alliance leading directly to the Death Star’s reactor core.
Modern organizations have their own “Death Star exhaust ports,” often because of change and drift:
- Exposed systems no one thinks are public
- Assets with missing security controls
- Identities with far more privilege/access than intended
Without accurate, continuously updated attack surface management—and a disciplined, consistent way to operationalize this management—weaknesses stay invisible until they’re exploited. The Death Star Problem doesn’t come about because you lack data; it happens when you lack dependable, continuous processes to turn fragmented data into verified truth and sustained remediation.
Why Attack Surface Management Matters
And why most teams struggle to sustain it.
Attack surface management goes beyond traditional inventories. It produces decision-grade truth by continuously reconciling the results of your asset visibility tools’ reporting with the actual assets that exist in your IT environment. It answers more than just what exists, including:
- Who owns the asset
- How it’s configured
- The security controls that protect it
- It’s exposure (last patch, integration with other systems, etc.)
- Compliance status with internal policy and industry regulations
More importantly, it updates continuously. In environments where assets are created, modified, and destroyed daily, yesterday’s data is already obsolete. This continuous feature is an operating commitment – integrations need upkeep, data needs curation, exceptions need triage, and actions need validation.
The shift from static asset lists to dynamic attack surface management enables proactive risk reduction, and in our rapidly progressing industry, proactiveness is a necessity. Gotham’s managed service offering powered by Axonius is designed to actualize this shift, approaching attack surface management as a program with measurable outcomes rather than simply deploying technology.
A New Hope
Axonius provides the platform foundation: it connects to your existing security and IT tools, correlates their data, and enables automation across the ecosystem.
Gotham provides the missing operating model: the people, process, and governance required to keep attack surface management accurate, constantly monitored, and tied to actionable remediation.
Together, Gotham and Axonius turn the Death Star Problem into a solvable program. Here’s what our managed services are built to deliver:
1. Fast onboarding to a unified, trusted asset inventory
The first step to securing exhaust ports is building a single, reconciled view of reality, quickly.
Gotham accelerates deployment by standing up Axonius in your environment, connecting the right sources, and baselining what “good” looks like for your organization, all without having to rip and replace the tools you currently rely on.
Using Axonius’ extensive integration ecosystem, Gotham helps you:
- Connect and validate data sources (endpoint, identity, cloud, network, SaaS) to eliminate single-tool blind spots
- Normalize and deduplicate conflicting records to produce a consistent asset identity
- Baseline coverage and key attributes so you can measure drift, gaps, and progress over time
The result is a living inventory of devices, identities, applications, software, cloud resources, and more, built on Axonius’ unified asset model and managed with Gotham’s hands-on expertise and experience.
This answers the foundational question: “What do we actually have, and can we trust it?”
2. Continuous monitoring of coverage gaps, exposure, and drift
Once you can see every layer of the Death Star, the next step is ensuring that it stays secure as it changes.
Visibility without ongoing monitoring soon turns into stale dashboards and poor data. Gotham’s always-on monitoring watches for drift and gaps like new assets appearing without owners, security tools losing coverage, identities with expanding privileges, and systems that become exposed in ways nobody intended.
Using Axonius as the correlation layer, Gotham maps assets to the issues that matter most, including:
- Security control coverage gaps (missing agents and scans, failed integrations)
- Vulnerabilities and misconfigurations ties to real asset context
- Policy violations and noncompliance evidence (what’s out of standard and where)
- Ownership, criticality, and business impact to prioritize what effectively reduces risk
Rather than treat every finding equally, Gotham helps prioritize and focus on the gaps and exposures that meaningfully improve your risk posture and tracks them through remediation.
This answers: “Where are our exhaust ports right now, and how fast are we closing them?”
It’s the difference between drowning in alerts and running an evidence-driven program that stands up in incidents and audits alike.
3. Automated enforcement and remediation – validated and reported
Knowing that an exhaust port exists is great, but you need a reliable way to close it – at scale.
Here is where the managed service model shines. Axonius enables action through automation and bidirectional integrations. Gotham designs, runs, and governs those automations so that they’re safe, consistent, and measurable.
Security teams can identify issues all day, but keeping up with remediation across thousands of assets with multiple owners can be tedious. Gotham uses Axonius to operationalize repeatable playbooks with guardrails, approvals, and validation so that fixes are implemented correctly and proactively.
Common automation and enforcement outcomes are:
- Enforced minimum security control coverage (e.g., ensuring EDR/MDM agents are present and healthy)
- Triggerable remediation workflows (open tickets, assign owners, and route exceptions)
- Reduced exposure from direct actions in authoritative systems (e.g., disable risky accounts, quarantine unmanaged devices, remove unauthorized software)
- Validation and reporting (prove what changed, what didn’t change, and why)
Automated enforcement and remediation close the actionability gap – the space between “we found a problem” and “we fixed it everywhere.” Gotham operating Axonius as a service gets you automation capabilities and the operational discipline to run them continuously and safely.
This answers: “What are we doing about the exhaust port, and how do we prove it’s staying fixed?”
The Security Posture Impact
As a managed program, Axonius’ attack surface management and automations translate into measurable security posture improvements. Gotham’s Axonius-powered managed service helps organization:
- Eliminate unknown assets – one of the most common root causes of breaches
- Reduce attack surface through continuous coverage validation
- Improve response speed during incidents by providing accurate asset context
- Strengthen compliance and audit readiness with real-time evidence
- Align security and IT teams around a shared source of truth
Instead of reacting to incidents after they happen, organizations can prevent them proactively, and secure against future occurrences with clearly defined, repeatable processes.
Final Thoughts
In our modern world of cloud sprawl, identity proliferation, and nonstop change, effective security is more than a great set of tools – it’s running the fundamentals consistently and without interruption. It’s about knowing what you have, understanding what’s exposed, and closing gaps at scale.
Axonius delivers the technology foundation for attack surface management and actionability. Gotham delivers the managed operating model: onboarding, round-the-clock monitoring, automation playbooks, and detailed reporting so the platform drives real outcomes, not shelfware.
To borrow from Star Wars once more, it seems like an impossible task to account for every exhaust port, vulnerability, or blind spot in something 75 miles in diameter. Modern IT environments may not be quite so huge, but their complexity is approaching science fiction territory. If the Empire had managed their attack surface with repeated verification, closed gaps during the construction of the Death Star (and, really, managed the identities of their staff a little better), maybe they wouldn’t have had to build a second one.
In any case, we know your organization isn’t bent on galactic domination, and you probably don’t have a rebel problem, but since we’re rolling with the metaphor, no one wants to risk what they’ve built over the years—least of all because of a single blind spot.
Gotham’s managed service offering powered by Axonius helps you see the whole Death Star, prove what’s protected, and remediate what isn’t before the real villains can take advantage.