8 Best Ways to Improve Asset Visibility and Control

TL;DR

Poor asset visibility creates security blind spots that attackers exploit. Organizations need complete asset discovery, agentless workflows, continuous monitoring, and IAM integration to protect their environments. Most teams discover hundreds of unknown assets when they implement proper visibility tools, revealing significant security gaps they never knew existed.

Key Takeaways

• Hybrid and multi-cloud environments account for 40% of data breaches, costing over five million dollars on average and involving compromised assets.
• When automated asset discovery is put in place by organizations, they usually stumble upon 805 unauthorized SaaS applications.
• Continuous monitoring cuts down the average time taken to correct serious weaknesses by more than three quarters.
• There is no need for agents in discovering methods; they do not hinder deployment and still provide complete visibility.

Introduction

A Fortune 500 healthcare provider discovered 847 cloud applications in active use. IT had approved 42. The remaining 805 represented shadow IT—each one a potential compliance violation and security risk. This wasn't uncovered through a breach. It came from implementing automated asset discovery.

Gartner finds that 30% of critical assets go undiscovered in most organizations. Every unknown asset is a potential entry point that attackers can exploit before your security team detects the threat. With breach lifecycles averaging 283 days, the window for exploitation stays wide open.

You can't protect what you don't know exists.

What is Asset Visibility?

Asset visibility means knowing exactly what digital resources exist in your environment at any given time. This includes every server, laptop, cloud instance, application, IoT device, and network endpoint that connects to your infrastructure.

Think of it as maintaining an accurate, real-time inventory—but for your entire digital environment instead of physical goods in a warehouse.

Context matters in asset visibility. Knowing an asset exists isn't enough. You need to understand its security posture, business criticality, who owns it, what data it accesses, and how it connects to other systems. This contextual awareness transforms raw inventory data into actionable security intelligence.

Without proper asset visibility, organizations face critical security gaps: unknown devices bypass security controls, unpatched systems remain exposed, shadow IT creates compliance violations, and incident response teams struggle to determine what data was compromised during breaches.

8 Ways to Improve Asset Visibility

1. Asset Discovery

You can’t protect what you don’t know exists. Start by finding every device, app, cloud resource, and endpoint in your environment. Most teams combine passive monitoring for real-time changes with periodic active scans to catch anything that slips through. Since environments change constantly, discovery has to run continuously—otherwise your inventory is outdated the moment it’s created.

2. Agentless Visibility

Agent deployment isn't always feasible across diverse environments. Unlike agent-based discovery, which requires the installation of an agent on each host to collect data regarding the devices and applications running on the host, agentless discovery can gather such data without having to tamper with the host in any way. This is particularly applicable in cases involving IoT, OT, contractor laptops as well as the cloud. With this approach, teams can easily obtain visibility without having to engage in continuous agent maintenance.

3. Continuous Monitoring

The scheduled scans offer only a sneak peek. On the other hand, continuous monitoring displays the current alterations. It notifies you of any new assets, changes in configurations or presence of anomalies. As a result, analysts do not speculate on the areas under attack but rather on those that are safe in relation to the event of such data being channeled to the SOC and response tools.

4. Identity Context

Assets alone don’t tell the full story. You also need to know who can access them and how. Connecting discovery with IAM helps uncover excessive permissions, stale accounts, and weak authentication. It also makes it easier to see how an attacker could move from one system to another if something gets compromised.

5. Fix What Matters

Once you know what you have, fixing vulnerabilities gets easier—and smarter. Instead of chasing every CVE, teams can focus on exposed systems, sensitive data, and vulnerabilities that are actually being exploited. Automation helps knock out low-risk issues quickly while tracking ownership and progress through existing workflows.

6. Find the Real Risk

Risk doesn’t usually come from a single issue. It comes from gaps that stack up—unpatched software, over-privileged accounts, and exposed services working together. Looking at assets, identities, and vulnerabilities in one place helps teams understand what could really happen if something goes wrong.

7. Reduce the Attack Surface

Visibility should lead to action. This involves getting rid of all unused cloud assets, deactivating dormant accounts, and discontinuing unnecessary software. Secure the public-facing systems and restrict as much entry as possible. Over time, this continuous cleanup reduces alert volume and accelerates response times for genuine threats.

8. Segment Intelligently

Segmentation limits how far an attacker can go. With a clear view of your assets and how they communicate, you can separate critical systems from everything else without breaking the business. Monitoring those boundaries helps catch mistakes early—and sometimes reveals an attack in progress.

What are the Benefits of Asset Visibility?

• Complete security coverage: When you know every asset in your environment, you can apply security controls consistently without gaps that attackers might exploit.
• Faster incident response: Teams spend less time investigating "what's compromised" and more time actually containing threats when they have accurate asset information at their fingertips.
• Reduced compliance burden: Automated asset tracking provides auditors with clear evidence of inventory management, a requirement for frameworks like NIST CSF, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.
• Better resource allocation: Security teams focus on protecting high-value targets rather than wasting effort on systems that don't matter or no longer exist.
• Lower breach costs: Organizations with comprehensive asset visibility reduce breach costs by detecting compromises faster and understanding exposure more accurately.
• Elimination of shadow IT: Discovering unauthorized applications and devices lets you bring them under management or decommission them before they create security incidents.
• Improved vulnerability management: Knowing what needs patching and prioritizing based on context reduces mean time to remediate by over 75%.

Why Asset Visibility Matters

Asset visibility forms the foundation of effective cybersecurity. Without it, security teams operate blind—applying patches to systems they think exist, writing firewall rules for networks they assume are configured correctly, and responding to incidents involving assets they didn't know they had.

Asset visibility gaps directly impact breach costs. IBM's 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that breaches involving hybrid and multi-cloud environments cost an average of $5 million and take 283 days to identify and contain. It increases this vulnerability period every time a potential entry point remains undetected.

Visibility alone is not enough without considering the circumstances for one to act upon it. A plain list of inventory will show one what there is. However, with context one can see the relevance, exposure, weaknesses, chain of attacks on noncompliance in order to reach critical systems with ease.

When organizations progress from using spreadsheets to adopting continuous automated visibility, they move from being reactive towards proactive risk mitigation. By doing this, they eliminate guesses about the contents of their environment and begin to make wise choices concerning control measures that will have maximum effect.

How Can Secure.com Help Improve Asset Visibility

Secure.com gives teams a clear, up-to-date view of everything in their environment without needing agents or heavy setup. You can be up and running in 30 minutes, and from there the platform continuously discovers assets across cloud services, SaaS tools, and on-premises systems (note: Secure.com is a cloud-only SaaS platform and does not support air-gapped or fully on-premises deployments), so nothing slips through the cracks.

With the Asset Insight module, assets are automatically discovered, classified, and tracked as they change over time. Updates happen in real time, which means teams always have an accurate inventory without chasing spreadsheets or doing manual audits. Visual infrastructure diagrams show how systems are connected, making it much easier to spot misconfigurations and understand potential attack paths.

Secure.com also helps teams see security issues the way an attacker would. Attack path analysis highlights how vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and IAM gaps could be chained together to reach critical systems, showing multi-hop routes from entry point to crown jewels. Blast radius mapping adds business context by showing the full potential impact of a single compromise, helping teams prioritize remediation based on actual business risk, helping teams prioritize what truly matters.

Because Secure.com integrates directly with vulnerability scanners, IAM tools, and SIEM platforms, asset data flows straight into day‑to‑day security operations. This cuts manual inventory work significantly, with customers reporting savings of 176 analyst hours per month (62% reduction in CMDB workload), and helps teams focus on real risks instead of reacting to every alert.

Overall, Secure.com turns asset visibility into something genuinely useful. It reduces breach risk, speeds up investigations, and gives security teams the clarity they need to work faster and smarter—without adding more tools or overhead.

FAQs

Conclusion

Asset visibility has become a foundational security requirement. Organizations that can't see their entire attack surface can't protect it effectively, leaving gaps that attackers will eventually exploit. The data is clear: 40% breaches involving scattered assets, most organizations fail to identify 30% of important assets while many other organizations discover hundreds of unauthorized applications only after they have deployed proper visibility tools.

To enhance asset visibility, one must take into account a number of factors as follows: carrying out full discovery through various techniques, using agentless workflows that remove deployment friction, continuously monitoring to know everything in real time, integrating IAM to understand who is who, vulnerability management that gives priority to real threats, being proactive in bridging gaps, reducing risks in a planned way, and segmenting networks so that the damage caused is limited.

Asset visibility alone cannot prevent all breaches. However, without it, all other security measures will have fundamental weaknesses that will compromise their effectiveness. Companies that invest in extensive asset visibility reduce breach costs, speed up incident handling, make it easier to comply with rules, and shift security personnel from being purely reactive to engaging in risk analysis.