The Hidden Cost of Partial Visibility: Why Your Security Stack is Leaving Money on the Table

Most organizations recognize that having unremediated vulnerabilities increases the likelihood and costs of a data breach. According to the 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, vulnerability exploitation accounted for 20% of reported data breaches. Simultaneously, the IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025 report found that data breaches arising from vulnerability exploitation cost an average of $4.24 million. These data points explain why organizations willingly invest a large amount of their IT and security budgets in vulnerability identification and management solutions. 

Despite these investments, many organizations still lack comprehensive visibility into their device deployments and risks. As organizations collect vulnerability scanners, endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, and network access control (NAC) systems, they create a fragmented view of their environment. As a result, security leaders spend more money without achieving the desired security posture. 

When faced with budget constraints and an evolving risk landscape, security and IT teams need to understand the financial impact that their fragmented device management tools create. 

Fragmented Tools Lead to Fragmented Visibility

In the never-ending quest to achieve full visibility into assets and risk, organizations adopt point solutions that respond to specific security issues. While these tools overlap in some areas, the Venn diagram of visibility is not a complete circle. 

Vulnerability Scanners

Most organizations have vulnerability scanners, the old, reliable technology that probes their IT environments to identify known flaws in operating systems, software, and, sometimes, firmware. Their value lies in:

• Finding reachable CVEs.  
• Enabling patch management workflows. 
• Providing vulnerability severity rating and compliance checks. 

However, despite their value, they create the following visibility gaps:

• Inability to identify devices, like Internet of Things (IoT), operational technology (OT), or unmanaged devices, and, in some cases, they can inadvertently take them offline.
• Misidentifying devices or aggregating them into general categories. 
• Inability to determine whether or not attackers can exploit vulnerabilities within the environment’s context, which can lead to inaccurate risk information. 

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

EDR solutions run agents on endpoints to detect suspicious behavior and log activity to support incident response teams. Their value lies in:

• Monitoring managed endpoints, like desktops, laptops, and servers. 
• Providing details about processes and operating systems running on devices. 
• Detecting advanced threats, like malware or ransomware, and automating response activities. 

However, they create the following visibility gaps:

• Inability to monitor devices that cannot support software, like IoT, OT, and medical devices. 
• Inaccurate device classification outside core IT assets. 
• Inability to monitor unmanaged or rogue devices. 

Network Access Control (NAC)

NAC solutions enforce authentication and security policies when devices connect to the network then block or quarantine them. Their value lies in:

• Tracking devices as they join the network. 
• Enforcing security posture policies, like secure configurations. 
• Providing network-based awareness for connected assets. 

However, they create the following visibility gaps:

• Less ongoing insight after the device connects to the network. 
• Weak vulnerability or threat detection context. 
• Poor visibility into short-term or segmented network environments. 

Configuration and Patch Management Tools 

These technologies distribute patches, enforce configurations, and track update compliance across managed devices. Their value lies in:

• Reporting patch status for supported systems.
• Enforcing baseline compliance. 
• Handling common enterprise software. 

However, this creates the following visibility gaps:

• Failure to work with IoT, OT, or other non-domain devices. 
• Inability to update unmanaged endpoints or shadow IT. 
• Failure to correlate patch data with real-world exploitability or business risk. 

Aggregation Is Not Comprehensive

Aggregating and correlating this data with a security incident and event management (SIEM) tool means collecting more data but not necessarily providing comprehensive visibility. Organizations continue to pay for overlapping capabilities, but the tools’ inability to easily integrate with each other leads to inefficient spending. 

These collected technologies do have overlaps that may lead organizations to assume they complete the picture:

• Vulnerability scanners and patch management both track missing updates, but classify devices differently.
• EDR and vulnerability scanners both report on software and operating system versions, but still miss unmanaged, agentless, or non-IT devices.  
• NAC and vulnerability scanners both identify connected devices, but with inconsistent classifications.

Despite having multiple technologies to detect, monitor, and manage device security, organizations still struggle, as even this aggregated technology stack fails to:

• Identify unmanaged or agentless devices, like IoT, OT, and medical devices. 
• Detect transient assets, like contractor laptops or shadow IT devices. 
• Accurately understand context or cross-validate data quality.
• Create a unified inventory. 

Best Practices for Optimizing the Security Stack and Closing the Visibility Gap

While each tool responds to a specific problem, organizations need to eliminate blind spots and optimize spending. To close these gaps, organizations should look for solutions that enable their security stack to work cohesively. 

Prioritize Data Normalization and Accuracy

Organizations may need to keep all their device monitoring and management tools, but they can optimize their ability to use them efficiently and effectively. They should look for ways or solutions to normalize data and select the most accurate attributes that each source provides. For example, organizations need the following device information:

• Manufacturer
• Device type
• IP addresses
• Applications on devices
• Operating systems and versions
• Software versions

By cross-validating data, organizations can achieve complete visibility into environment coverage and build an accurate asset inventory. 

Combine Asset Visibility with Impact-Based Prioritization

Once organizations build a comprehensive asset inventory, they can begin improving their vulnerability remediation and management processes. By aggregating all vulnerability and asset data, security and vulnerability management teams can gain insight into their critical assets. This visibility enables them to prioritize the devices whose disruption would have the most organizational and business impact. 

Build Environment Context into Risk Prioritization

Many organizations implement security controls, like network segmentation. When attackers attempt to exploit a device, these other controls may mitigate risk or impact. For example, an organization may use targeted segmentation, a strategy that groups devices with similar risk profiles on the same network. To truly understand risk, organizations should ensure that their vulnerability prioritization strategy relies on normalized data with clear, actionable insights. 

Ensure Scalability and Breadth of Coverage

While point solutions excel at their intended function, organizations often struggle as their environments grow more complex. Organizations should ensure that they can integrate any vulnerability management program across IT, IoT, and OT environments while scaling with new data sources. 

Asimily: The Key to Unlocking Your Security Stack’s Value

Asimily’s purpose-built solution enables organizations to normalize data that their device monitoring and management stack generates. Without disrupting services, our passive network scanning solution collects data from all devices, including IT, IoT, OT, and medical devices. By integrating data from across the technology stack, Asimily enables organizations to build a single, validated source of trust. With complete visibility and IT environment context, organizations can accurately prioritize vulnerability remediation activities, eliminate redundant spend, and achieve compliance objectives.

To learn more about Asimily’s capabilities for your entire asset fleet, from IT to OT, request a demo.