In early 2026, ServiceNow announced its acquisition of Armis, a cybersecurity company focused on connected devices, and among the company's capabilities is real-time, agentless asset discovery for all classes of connected assets.
Please note that there is a wealth of Armis security functionality I am not discussing in this post. There is plenty of time for that; the deal only closed this week. But we can immediately drive value by using the power of Armis in combination with the power of the ServiceNow platform.
Most notably, this acquisition is intriguing for ServiceNow (and its customers) because it pushes the ServiceNow platform to the next stage in autonomous asset management intelligence and helps retailers lay the foundation for AI-ready operations and greatly improved IoT security and compliance.
Like many industries, retail relies heavily on IoT to run its business and to give its customers great experiences. Think about all the smart shelves, RFID tags, beacons, connected POS systems, security cameras, and sensors found in any retail outlet. These IoT devices are multiplying logarithmically, and they have traditionally been very difficult to discover; this is the real problem.
Not having visibility into the devices and not managing them makes them easy for hackers to exploit and expensive for retailers to manage (Spoiler: Armis changes this). The result of this discovery gap problem creates an IoT security risk.
For an example of how a seemingly mundane unmanaged IoT device led to a real-world disaster, consider The Mirai Botnet from 2016, which was an IoT threat vector that is still active today.
The Mirai IoT attacks in 2016 involved malware that infected hundreds of thousands of poorly secured internet-connected devices, like cameras and routers, and turned them into a massive botnet. This botnet was used to launch large, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, including a major attack on the DNS provider Dyn, which disrupted access to popular websites like Twitter and Netflix.
Mirai spread by scanning the internet for devices using default usernames and passwords, making it highly effective against insecure IoT hardware.
The release of Mirai’s source code later in 2016 allowed other hackers to create similar botnets, marking a turning point in cybersecurity and highlighting serious vulnerabilities in IoT devices
If IoT devices are on the network and unmanaged, it’s very difficult to maintain the devices, and, much more importantly, it’s impossible to secure those devices. The adage is a little tired, but it is very difficult to protect a device that you do not know about or one that is not actively managed.
To derisk your IoT devices, they must be flipped from unmanaged to managed. The very first step is visibility; being able to see them on the network and knowing what they are.
Core to Armis is the Asset Intelligence Engine. It is a giant, crowdsourced, cloud-based knowledge base, which is the largest in the world, tracking over five billion assets. And it’s growing. Each profile includes unique device information such as:
How often each asset communicates with other devices (and over what protocols)
How much data is typically transmitted
Whether the asset is usually stationary
What software runs on each asset
Armis records and keeps a history of everything each asset does, and can catalog all your IoT devices in real time, and it knows exactly what they are.
From this point, enriching the assets data and bringing them into a unified system of record, the ServiceNow CMDB, is straightforward, especially if you are working with the partner who has written most of the integrations for this type of thing.
Once these devices are in the ServiceNow CMDB, the possibility to manage them efficiently and use them as trusted and foundational data for your security program and for your AI innovation is nearly limitless.
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The key takeaway? Well, it's early. But already, Armis solves the problem of IoT visibility in retail organizations. And ServiceNow makes the data actionable across your enterprise, your security program, and your AI innovations.
More notably, it makes your investment more relevant as ServiceNow continues to move from “platform of action” to a “platform of intelligence and AI enablement."