At RSAC Conference 2026, Angelos Kottas of Axonius makes the case that visibility without follow-through is just a board report -- and that the security industry is now entering a new era defined by actionability. This conversation explores what that shift means for CISOs navigating AI, exposure management, and the persistent challenge of managing assets they can barely see.
Security teams have more data than ever -- and less confidence in it. Angelos Kottas, VP of Product and Corporate Marketing at Axonius, opens by sharing a striking finding from the Axonius Actionability Report: 55% of CISOs still run their environments off spreadsheets, and fewer than 20% have daily updates to their asset data. The result is a gap between what organizations think they know and what is actually happening across their digital real estate.
Axonius was founded in 2017 after its co-founders witnessed a Fortune 100 retailer go into crisis during a live security incident -- unable to identify which assets were impacted or who owned them. That founding story still frames the company's mission: give security teams a comprehensive, enriched, and current view of every asset so they can stop flying blind.
But Kottas argues that visibility alone is no longer the goal. Axonius launched its exposure management product at RSAC Conference 2025 -- its most successful product launch to date -- and the message from customers is consistent: what used to take weeks now takes hours or minutes. The platform now enables teams to move from discovery to coverage gap analysis to prioritized remediation, all in one place.
The business case is real. Texas A&M University used Axonius to gamify risk reduction across its decentralized schools and divisions, turning remediation into a leaderboard and dramatically accelerating time to closure. An entertainment company customer used Axonius during the 2024 CrowdStrike Blue Screen of Death incident to scope its impact and build a remediation plan in minutes -- delaying operations by just five minutes, while others faced days of disruption.
Kottas also addresses the AI question head-on. He frames it as AI squared: the foundation for artificial intelligence is asset intelligence. Agentic AI and autonomous SOC workflows are only as reliable as the data underneath them. Conflicting endpoint counts across EDR, CMDB, and other tools produce dirty data that undermines AI trust. Axonius solves this by delivering a deduplicated, enriched asset graph with business context layered in -- so AI systems can make recommendations organizations can actually act on.
This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight
GUEST
Angelos Kottas, VP of Product and Corporate Marketing, Axonius
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amkottas/
RESOURCES
Axonius website: https://www.axonius.com
Axonius Actionability Report: https://www.axonius.com (available on the Axonius website)
Adapt 2026 (annual customer conference, April 15, New York City): https://www.axonius.com
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KEYWORDS
Angelos Kottas, Axonius, Sean Martin, asset intelligence, exposure management, cyber asset attack surface management, CAASM, vulnerability management, actionability, CISO visibility, AI in cybersecurity, agentic AI, asset discovery, coverage gap analysis, incident response, RSAC Conference 2026, brand spotlight, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast
From Visibility to Actionability: How Asset Intelligence Drives Real Security Outcomes | A Brand Spotlight at RSAC Conference 2026 with Angelos Kottas, VP of Product and Corporate Marketing at Axonius
[00:00:10] Sean Martin: Ready for some fun?
[00:00:11] Angelos Kottas: I'm ready.
[00:00:12] Sean Martin: It's all fun here. All fun and games. It's the RSAC Conference.
[00:00:15] Angelos Kottas: That's right. That's right.
[00:00:17] Sean Martin: And here we are. Angelos.
[00:00:19] Angelos Kottas: Yes.
[00:00:19] Sean Martin: How are you, my friend?
[00:00:20] Angelos Kottas: Good. A little tired. Day four RSAC.
[00:00:23] Sean Martin: It's the final moments.
[00:00:24] Angelos Kottas: Yes. Yes. The final moments, but also energized. Also energized by the conversations.
[00:00:27] Sean Martin: I know. I'm surprised by how much energy I still have. After all the stuff we've done and the conversations we've had -- good times down in the Axonius booth.
[00:00:37] Angelos Kottas: Yeah. We're in the North Hall this year. And playing off a little bit of a music theme, doing some Guitar Hero and things like that. But also educating conference attendees about what is asset intelligence and how we can help.
[00:00:53] Sean Martin: So let's start with you. Your role at Axonius and maybe a few words about yourself.
[00:01:00] Angelos Kottas: Sure. I'm Vice President of product and corporate marketing. But I really come from the product side. I've been doing product management, product marketing for 18-plus years. Started my career in cybersecurity. Did some tours in data platforms and app dev as well, but kind of always close to the security market. And I jumped back in full time at Axonius about 18 months ago. So it's been a wild ride.
[00:01:26] Sean Martin: My favorite role is product management. I like defining and building stuff.
[00:01:32] Angelos Kottas: That's right.
[00:01:33] Sean Martin: Because there's no lack of problems to solve, right? You can help solve them.
[00:01:36] Angelos Kottas: That's right.
[00:01:36] Sean Martin: So speaking of solving problems, give me an overview of Axonius and what you and the team provide for your customers.
[00:01:45] Angelos Kottas: So we define ourselves as an asset intelligence platform. And we believe that assets are at the heart of your digital real estate. In order to remediate and manage that environment, you need to know what's actually going on in your IT real estate. That's actually a little bit of the origin story of Axonius. Our co-founders were having meetings with CISOs -- they were meeting with the CSO of one of the Fortune 100 retailers -- and an incident happened while they were there. A famous incident. They didn't know how to respond. They didn't know who owned the assets that were impacted. They didn't know what the blast radius was. And it became a full-on crisis. And our founders were like, in this day and age, we cannot have CISOs flying blind. We need to empower them with visibility. And so they founded the company -- one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies. They founded it in 2017. It's been a rocket ship. It started with that visibility problem and we delivered enormous value. We just did a survey of CISOs and they told us that to this day, 55% of CISOs still rely on spreadsheets and manual updates to manage their environments. And that's just a shocking problem. However, our customers took us to what we now see as the next phase, and that is actionability.
[00:03:20] Sean Martin: Visibility --
[00:03:21] Angelos Kottas: -- to actionability. Exactly. Because visibility gives you the confidence to know what is going on. But visibility without follow-through is a board report. It's a compliance report. What our customers were increasingly doing with our platform was saying, we want to orchestrate the solution. What do we do once we uncover a challenge? Is it a mitigation? Is it a remediation? Is it an optimization where we're simply overpaying or should have retired something? And more recently, not just doing that in the context of asset intelligence, but going into the world of vulnerabilities and exposure management.
[00:04:01] Sean Martin: Right.
[00:04:02] Angelos Kottas: So last year at RSAC Conference, we launched our exposure management products. So this is our one-year anniversary. And it's been the most successful product launch we've had at Axonius because it was such a natural evolution of what we were doing. We were being used for asset intelligence with our cyber asset product. We had workflows and action center, and our customers were building their own exposure management solutions using our platform. So we said, let's handle that for you. Let us build a dedicated product. It has become one of the fastest attaches to our install base. Every quarter we beat our KPIs on the expansion of the product within our install base as well as new accounts. And the translation is into time. Our customers tell us that what used to take them weeks to tackle can now be done in hours or minutes.
[00:05:07] Sean Martin: With confidence. And probably some consistency, right?
[00:05:11] Angelos Kottas: Yeah. Especially in the age of AI and the rise of the autonomous self-healing -- the vision of the autonomous SOC. The biggest challenge with AI is AI operating on faulty data, stale data, conflicting data -- what we call dirty data. And so the power that Axonius brings to this is the most complete, enriched, contextualized asset graph that tells you not just what assets do I own, but what are the security vulnerabilities? What is the business context? Which are your crown jewels? Which are production code? Which are exposed to the internet? So that you don't just drown in a sea of alerts -- you actually have a prioritized map of which fixes will have the greatest impact in raising your security posture.
[00:06:01] Sean Martin: Where to focus your actions.
[00:06:02] Angelos Kottas: Exactly. And actionability -- we think it's a movement. It's bigger than what we do. Actually, our founder, now executive chairman, Dean Sysman, spoke yesterday on the main stage about actionability. And we think it is a movement. It's the next phase. People don't want to work for their technology. They want their technology to work for them. And actionability is really what lets you pay off that value.
[00:06:27] Sean Martin: And your investment in that -- it's not just a word, it's actual action. You put together an Actionability Report?
[00:06:36] Angelos Kottas: Yep. It's a trend report -- the Actionability Report from Axonius, available on our website. We surveyed 600 top security and IT professionals to ask them about how they track visibility within their environments. How confident are they in their data? How unified is their tool set? And the results were really enlightening. Less than half of the CISOs actually have a single view of their environments. They have multiple views, and those views are incompatible. A majority -- 55% -- run their business on spreadsheets. A minority of CISOs, less than 20%, had daily updates to that data. Most had monthly, quarterly, or ad hoc updates, so they didn't know if they were operating on the correct view. And when you talk about these big breaches and big public notifications, it's often not a new exploit. It's an exploit that's been out there and has been overlooked. The Actionability Report is a guide to how to really gather the data, do the analysis, prioritize the remediation, and do the fixes before you get impacted by an attack.
[00:08:02] Sean Martin: So how does what you found in the Actionability Report line up -- or perhaps help you become even more enlightened -- as you're talking to CISOs in person here in San Francisco?
[00:08:14] Angelos Kottas: Well, at the end of the day, CISOs don't care about products or features. They care about the pain points that keep them up and the metrics they're measured against with their boards and with their C-suite. A key part of the Actionability Report feeds into what we've defined as the core solutions -- the repeatable challenges that we solve for our customers. When we go to a customer, we don't say, buy an asset intelligence platform. We say, how do you handle incident response? How do you close coverage gaps? How do you deliver a vision of cyber resilience? Let's talk about the pain points. What are the metrics? What are the obstacles? And how can Axonius as an actionability platform, as an asset intelligence platform, really drive mean time to ownership and mean time to resolution for you?
[00:09:10] Sean Martin: Where do you want to get to? Where are you and how can we help you?
[00:09:13] Angelos Kottas: Yeah. Playing on the CISO community we've been talking with this week on the West coast -- we're kind of bringing that to the East coast next month. My hometown, New York City. We are doing our annual customer conference, April 15th. It's called Adapt, because it's about the roadmap for the CISO's future. And we have some phenomenal CISOs joining us on stage, sharing their stories and their journey -- not just with Axonius, but with the industry and their vision for the future. One of our executives, our chief strategy officer, is a former CISO. Ryan Niesley was the CISO at Disney and at Costco. He was a two-time customer of Axonius, and when he decided he wanted to join the other side, he said, let me go to Axonius and evangelize the power I found with Axonius with my peers.
[00:10:12] Sean Martin: What's his view for the -- if he had to summarize -- I'm asking you to speak on his behalf, I'm sure you've talked to him a lot -- how does he say Axonius really helps him?
[00:10:27] Angelos Kottas: The CISOs who have used us can't imagine a world without Axonius. One of the common adoption paths for Axonius is when a CISO moves to their next company. If that next company doesn't already have Axonius, one of the first things the CISO does is bring Axonius to the table. It starts with that concept of visibility -- they are driving blind. It's like driving with a windshield that's covered in mud. You don't know where your blind spots are. You don't know the hidden risks that might take down your organization -- reputational damage in addition to financial damage. And so they put their trust in Axonius to be that source of insight, that single source of truth that guides their security programs.
[00:11:13] Sean Martin: And that truth enables trust, I would imagine, for the CISO with their peers, the executive leadership team, but also to the board. Can you describe how that works?
[00:11:26] Angelos Kottas: Well, there are two journeys. One is stack assurance and compliance. One of the biggest things you do at the board level is that you have a series of benchmarks or frameworks you need to audit against and report up to the board. So many of our customers use the visibility and asset intelligence platform to automate and take processes that may have taken weeks previously into automated reports that they just bring to the board. The interesting part is there's an interesting relationship between security and IT -- they're on the same team, but sometimes they also have disagreements. Many of our customers -- Texas A&M University talks about how they initially had a monthly meeting between the security team and the IT team. The security team would bring their Axonius reports and the IT organization had their CMDB readouts and spreadsheets. And they would look at the Axonius readout and say, that's way better than what I'm using -- can you run that report for me? So as a matter of due course, even though security bought the platform, it ended up becoming one of the primary tools for IT as well.
[00:12:36] Sean Martin: Very, very cool.
[00:12:37] Angelos Kottas: Yeah.
[00:12:37] Sean Martin: What's next -- thinking about the CISO's challenges -- you can't avoid the two-letter word that got 'agentic' dropped in front of it.
[00:12:57] Angelos Kottas: Yes.
[00:12:58] Sean Martin: How do you think that affects their world, and how does Axonius help them stay on top of that?
[00:13:05] Angelos Kottas: Well, we like to joke that the foundation for artificial intelligence is asset intelligence -- it's AI squared. So you need the best context to feed your AI systems in order to trust them. If you look at surveys on AI adoption, the promise of AI remains lofty and ambitious, but the actual adoption is still held back. There's a lack of trust -- people say, let me go ahead and trust this recommendation and automate this workflow based on AI. And part of that is you don't know when it might take down your system. It might delete your code. It might actually increase rather than reduce risk. We believe that the right data drives the best AI outcomes. The durable context that comes from Axonius -- the ability to marry not just volumes of data. It's not just how many data points you got. Our customers say, we don't have too little data. We have too much data, but I don't know how to reconcile the conflicts in that data. How many endpoints do I have? If I ask my EDR system, I get one answer. If I ask my CMDB, I get a different answer. Every system provides a conflicting view. We are able to reconcile that data -- we can deduplicate it, enrich it, and provide context. And perhaps most strategically, it's not just security or vulnerability context -- it is also business context. To really drive automation and AI, you need to understand not just what your systems do, but what the business impact of those systems is.
[00:15:01] Sean Martin: And speaking of that business view -- you talk about CISOs moving company to company, and one of the first things they do is bring Axonius in. How much of that is driven by business versus just needing to understand what tech and systems they have?
[00:15:18] Angelos Kottas: It will often start with one of these use cases -- often something like, I just need asset discovery. I need to know what I have. I have a CMDB and I don't believe it's right. I need a way to have the most comprehensive and current view of my assets. So it starts with discovery. It often goes from there into coverage gaps -- CrowdStrike's missing from a bunch of endpoints, or I don't have SSO configured here, or I need this encryption deployed. But the unlock that's really driving a lot of conversations now is CTA and exposure management. Because now you're talking about real risk, real business impact. It's not just about knowing what I have and covering gaps -- it's having a prioritized action plan to reduce exposure. The Texas A&M example: each school, each division owns their own IT resources, and there was a centralized security org trying to determine how to reduce risk. They gamified it. They took the Axonius view of each department and each school and gave each a risk score -- number of risks, time outstanding. They did a leaderboard -- or maybe a stragglers board -- and they dramatically reduced coverage gaps and accelerated time to remediation across the entire school.
[00:16:55] Sean Martin: I love it. I want to ask you -- we have a couple minutes left. That's a great example of an outcome of the actions. Can you share another one or two?
[00:17:03] Angelos Kottas: Yeah. Everyone's familiar with the CrowdStrike Blue Screen of Death incident from 2024. Delta Airlines was famously down for several days. Their reservation systems -- they lost hundreds of millions of dollars of impact. One of our customers, a large entertainment company, had our solution and they were able to identify the scope of the impact and the remediation plan in a matter of minutes. They delayed operations by five minutes in one of their entertainment properties. They had no meaningful business impact because they had that visibility and that trust with Axonius.
[00:17:49] Sean Martin: I love it.
[00:17:50] Angelos Kottas: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:51] Sean Martin: Good stuff. To me, it's all about the outcome.
[00:17:54] Angelos Kottas: Yeah.
[00:17:54] Sean Martin: Otherwise, it's just busy work.
[00:17:55] Angelos Kottas: Yeah, absolutely. Clearly working with you and the team at Axonius gets companies from visibility to actionability. So those outcomes matter.
[00:18:03] Angelos Kottas: And if you're in New York mid-April, come join us. Not just for customers -- we'll take interested parties as well.
[00:18:09] Sean Martin: Name of the event?
[00:18:10] Angelos Kottas: It's called Adapt.
[00:18:11] Sean Martin: Adapt. That's right.
[00:18:11] Angelos Kottas: Adapt 2026 in New York City.
[00:18:13] Sean Martin: And the Actionability Report has some good info in it, so grab a copy of that.
[00:18:17] Angelos Kottas: Available on our website.
[00:18:18] Sean Martin: Connect with the Axonius team. Angelos, pleasure, my friend.
[00:18:24] Angelos Kottas: Thanks so much.
[00:18:24] Sean Martin: Thanks. Cheers everybody.