January 29, 2026
You can’t secure what you can’t see.
The problem is that seeing your entire digital estate is becoming more difficult. More tools, platforms, framework and vendors are being added all the time.
And those are just the ones you know about. It’s not even considering that between 30% and 40% of IT spend in enterprise businesses goes on shadow IT, or that more than 40% of businesses think shadow IT is becoming a bigger problem.
That’s why IT Asset Management (ITAM) is such a big part of your cyber defence. It gives security teams a trusted, real-time view of what’s in your IT estate, what’s at risk and what needs fixing as a priority.
ITAM can show you where everything is
IT security teams want fewer unknowns. Unknowns are where risks come from.
Nearly half of organisations that suffered a security breach traced it back to unmanaged devices in one study.
Any lack of visibility means you can’t know if governance and security protections are in place, leading to a potentially unknown and unguarded attack surface for cyber criminals to exploit.
ITAM knows exactly what’s out there. But with no single source of truth, there’s a risk the data stays separate.
If this happens, visibility breaks down, machines get missed, devices go unpatched and servers stay online with no owner or support plan.
This is how threats creep in.
Imagine an enterprise business with more than 5,000 devices. If even 1% of those devices aren’t visible, it’s 50 extra opportunities for cyber criminals to find a way into your systems.
Your asset data is a clear line of defence
Most breaches aren’t because of zero-day exploits.
They usually happen because of old machines, forgotten or unmanaged software and misconfigured endpoints.
These are all things a solid ITAM platform can expose.
Effective ITAM provides full visibility, showing you what’s running on your IT estate, where it is, who’s responsible for it and if it’s up-to-date.
This is what security teams need to act fast.
Think back to the Log4shell incident in 2021.
This was a critical vulnerability in a popular logging tool Log4j, used by millions of computers (including those used by organisations and governments) running online services.
When the vulnerability was identified, the National Cyber Security Centre gave the following advice:
“The best thing you can do to protect yourself is make sure your devices and apps are as up to date as possible and continue to update them regularly, particularly over the next few weeks.”
The only way you could do this properly would be to have full visibility of all your devices, which ITAM provides. With a visibility gap, there’d have always been a risk you wouldn’t find every device, and have a potential security breach waiting to happen.
Respond faster, and prove you’re in control
Security and governance rules don’t just require you to block threats, now you also have to prove you’re in control if something does go wrong.
GDPR, for example, requires full audit trails of steps taken or actions completed to prevent attacks.
Any gaps in this information mean you risk falling below compliance standards which, for GDPR, can result in fines of up to £8.7m or 2% of global annual turnover (whichever is higher) for lower-tier breaches.
For higher-tier breaches, fines can reach up to £17.5m or 4% of global annual turnover (again, whichever is highest).
ITAM gives you accurate and accessible asset data that lets you act fast in the event of a breach, but also makes it easier to document what’s been done and what data you have, with no gaps.
Considering that auditors often expect 95% visibility as a baseline, this is critical.
Below that, confidence in your data drops, and compliance becomes a lot harder.
Shared data is better than more tools
The answer to better security and compliance isn’t always more software.
Security stacks are usually crowded enough.
What you need is better integration between the tools you already have.
When ITAM data flows into CMDBs, SIEM dashboards and vulnerability management platforms, it gives everyone the same accurate picture of what’s live, what’s exposed and what needs urgent attention.
Imagine a global retailer with its asset inventory linked to the relevant tools. Their security team could instantly cross-reference patch levels, ownership details and warranty status with threat data from one screen.
If a zero-day alert came in, they’d instantly have a verified list of affected machines so they could act quickly.
So it’s a worry that 43% of IT pros say they still track assets in spreadsheets.
Improving security starts with visibility
You can buy all the security software you want, but if you don’t have visibility over what needs protecting, you’re always going to have gaps and risks.
Many of the leading security tools do, generally, have good discovery capability to find gaps and interrogate networks. But they’re never perfect, so having a safety net in place to catch anomalies is essential.
If something happens, you want to know quickly what’s affected and how to fix it, without digging through old files and spreadsheets.
Even if ITAM doesn’t naturally sit under the banner of security, this is what it can help with.
Improving your security starts with improving visibility. And this is what ITAM provides.
Book a free demo of Certero’s ITAM platform and see how we can help you improve visibility, control and security across your entire digital estate
