Struggling to find the right ASM tool for your team?
With so many options, choosing the right Attack Surface Management (ASM) tool can feel overwhelming.
This guide breaks down the key criteria to help you make a confident decision. Learn about the key capabilities to help secure your organization and then you can review the Top 11 Attack Surface Management (ASM) Solutions to see if one meets your needs.
Key Capabilities Criteria to Evaluate ASM Tools
When selecting the right attack surface management solutions, it’s crucial to evaluate ASM tools based on asset discovery, integration, scalability, threat intelligence, and user experience.
The strongest ASM platforms aren’t just about “finding stuff.” They combine continuous discovery, contextual prioritization, integrations, and actionable remediation to reduce risk across both your own assets and your extended ecosystem.
Leading attack surface management vendors differentiate themselves by offering the following robust capabilities in an automated and continuous method:
1. Automated and Continuous Asset Identification and Footprinting
Top-tier attack surface management companies prioritize comprehensive tools to discover and identify known, unknown, shadow assets, cloud and third/fourth-party assets; useful for M&A diligence and subsidiary monitoring. This will give full visibility across your digital footprint.
- Comprehensive Asset Discovery
- Third and 4th Party Asset Discovery
- Contextual Asset Classification
This is crucial because nearly 73% of security leaders experienced incidents caused by unknown or unmanaged assets, according to a Trend Micro survey.
How FortifyData Does This:
- Builds a full inventory of domains, IPs, cloud instances, APIs, and applications tied to your organization without manual input, including Subsidiary and Department organization.
- Automatically discovers and monitors all internet-facing assets—including known, unknown, and shadow IT—on an ongoing basis.
- Performs asset discovery without deploying agents, scaling easily across cloud, hybrid, and global infrastructures.
- Identifies when new assets appear, configurations change, or systems go offline—alerting security teams.
2. Integration and Compatibility
Seamless compatibility with existing security stacks (SIEM, SOAR, ticketing tools) ensures smooth operations and better alert correlation.
ASM tools should unify with your current systems to reduce silos and allow faster detection, triage, and response to potential threats. Automation is key to get this data to other systems and teams that can act on the data and get up-to-date reporting.
- SIEM/SOAR/Ticketing Integration
- GRC and Compliance Mapping
- Customizable Dashboards and Reporting
How FortifyData Does This:
- Native integration with other FortifyData modules: Risk and Compliance (GRC), Third-party Risk management and Reporting Suite. Integrations with other tools available.
- Native task collaboration feature to expedite team communication
- Integrations with other tools available
3. Risk Assessment and Prioritization
Organizations should focus on vulnerability identification by detecting CVEs, misconfigurations, and weak encryption in real time. It is equally important to integrate business context, prioritizing vulnerabilities not only by severity scores such as CVSS but also by exploitability (e.g., the CISA KEV catalog), data sensitivity, and overall business impact. Clear, quantitative risk scoring and ranking then enable security teams to allocate resources more effectively.
- Vulnerability identification
- Business Context Integration
- Risk Scoring and Ranking
How FortifyData Does This:
- Classifies discovered assets by geography, business unit, and criticality, making the footprint meaningful and actionable.
- Enriches discovered assets with vulnerability data, KEV exposure, and exploit intelligence to assess risk relevance.
- Monitors and reports on vulnerabilities, time to remediate, patching cadence
4. Scalability and Performance
ASM tools must handle growing attack surfaces without performance lags, essential for dynamic, cloud-first environments that could have a global asset footprint. For external, you can find vendors that don’t require an agent of sensor.
Whether your infrastructure spans multiple clouds or hybrid setups, your ASM platform should maintain real-time visibility at any scale without degradation.
- Ease of Deployment
- Global Scalability
- Intuitive User Experience
How FortifyData Does This:
- Performs asset discovery without deploying agents, scaling easily across cloud, hybrid, and global infrastructures.
- Domain-Centric Discovery: Starting with your primary domain, FortifyData spiders out to map subdomains and associated domains, validating them through DNS to build an accurate asset footprint and minimize false positives. Additional domains or private IPs can also be included for complete visibility.
- Comprehensive Fingerprinting & Threat Enrichment: Each discovered asset is fingerprinted across all ports and services (not just common ones) to uncover vulnerabilities, then enriched with active cyber threat intelligence—highlighting KEVs, ransomware-linked exposures, and live threats for prioritized response.
4. Threat Intelligence and Enrichment
Enriched data, such as context from CVEs, dark web findings, external scans, or adversary behavior, enables teams to prioritize exposures that matter most to their organization.
Real-time insights reduce breach risk; 76% of organizations agree that timely threat intelligence enhances protection.
5. Usability and User Experience
Intuitive dashboards and simplified workflows make complex data actionable, even for non-technical teams.
The ability for collaboration with the ASM tool will help teams use the findings in the workflow of your organization. Robust access control and user management to ensure the right person sees the necessary information at the right time.
Good design enhances productivity: users should quickly spot critical risks, generate reports, and configure alerts without needing deep technical knowledge.
Struggling to find unknown exposed assets?
FortifyData’s Attack Surface Management platform continuously scans and maps your entire digital footprint, including shadow IT, rogue subdomains, and cloud misconfigurations.
How to Choose the Right Attack Surface Management Solution
Choosing the right ASM tool from the varieaty of attack surface management tool solutions can feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.
1. Define Your Security Objectives
Start by identifying what you need most. Is it visibility into cloud misconfigurations? Real-time alerts? Code based vulnerabilities? Or seamless vulnerability management? Or do you need accurate risk prioritization for your security team?
Every ASM tool has different strengths. Choosing becomes easier when your goals are specific. For example, 88% of agencies say that cloud misconfigurations are one of their top security concerns.
2. Map Organizational Complexity
Every organization is different. List your internal systems, external-facing assets, cloud providers, and third-party dependencies. This helps align the tool’s capabilities with your specific environment.
Mapping what you know helps reveal what you don’t and guides your selection to tools that can automatically discover unknown assets.
3. Prioritize Criteria Using Weighted Scoring
Not every feature matters equally. For some teams, real-time detection matters more than user interface. Others may need advanced integrations with SIEM or ticketing tools, or have a focus on risk acceptance and likelihood adjustments.
Use a weighted scorecard to rank each tool based on factors like:
- Continuous and automated
- Scalability
- Ease of deployment – agents or agentless?
- Accuracy of risk scores
- Support and pricing
4. Run Pilot Tests and Demos
Request trial access or demos. Let your team test real scenarios with your systems.
Many ASM tools offer a free assessment and an overview of their methodology, making it easy to compare to your current ASM tool findings.
If a tool misses known assets or returns too many false positives, it may struggle in production.
5. Involve All Stakeholders
Attack surface management impacts more than just the security team. Loop in IT, compliance, and business units early on. Their input ensures the chosen tool fits operational workflows and supports broader objectives like regulatory readiness or uptime protection.
Cisco’s survey reveals that 55% of organizations that formed cross-functional cyber teams saw an improvement in collaboration and security.
Core Capabilities of ASM Tools
| Capability | Description |
| Asset Discovery | Discover all internet-facing assets, including forgotten or shadow IT, so nothing slips through the cracks. |
| Real-Time Monitoring | Continuously monitor your footprint and assets for changes, exposures, or misconfigurations in real-time. |
| Vulnerability Management | Automate vulnerability management by identifying and prioritizing high-risk threats, enriched with threat intel and business context, before attackers can exploit them. |
| Contextual Risk Scoring | Provide contextual risk scoring that includes operational context (criticality) to help security teams focus on what truly matters. |
| Tool Integration | Integrate seamlessly with existing SIEM and SOAR tools for faster response workflows. |
| Attack Path Visualization | Offer attack path visualization to see how a threat actor might pivot through your environment. |
| Proactive Threat Intelligence | Enable proactive defense with external threat intelligence woven into every scan assessment and alert. |
Also Read: Top 11 Attack Surface Managment (ASM) Tools
Find the Right ASM Tool Without the Guesswork
Choosing the wrong attack surface management solution can lead to blind spots, wasted budget, and increased risk. With so many attack surface management vendors out there, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Attack Surface Management with FortifyData
Our platform offers powerful, real-time attack surface management services, giving you automated vulnerability insights and seamless integration with your existing tools.
- Continuous Asset Inventory: This feature scans the internet and your internal network 24/7. It automatically discovers new domains, cloud instances, and endpoints.
- Real-Time Risk Scoring: Risk scores update dynamically as new threat data arrives related to operational criticality of assets. That means your priorities adjust instantly when attackers target your industry or technology.
- Full Scope Visibility: The platform covers everything from external-facing APIs to internal servers, cloud environments and endpoints. It spots misconfigurations and forgotten infrastructure.
- Vendor & Third-Party Risk Monitoring: FortifyData tracks risks associated with your vendors and suppliers. It assesses how externally exposed those third parties are.
- Audit-Ready Reporting & Cyber GRC Integration: Built-in dashboards align with compliance frameworks like SOC 2, NIS 2, ISO 27001 or your preferred framework.
Request a free demo of FortifyData today and secure what truly matters.
FAQs
1: What is the biggest mistake organizations make when choosing an ASM tool?
Many attack surface management companies focus solely on marketing claims or the number of features, without aligning the tool to their specific risk profile or infrastructure type. A MECE-based evaluation can prevent this misalignment.
2: Are free ASM tools worth considering for startups or small businesses?
Yes, especially for those just beginning their security journey. Open-source or freemium tools can provide basic visibility, and may focus on common port security, but scaling and support may become issues as the company grows.
