December 4, 2025
Cloud and SaaS might dominate IT spending.
But everything still runs on physical machines.
Every workload sits on a server.
Every employee depends on a laptop or mobile.
Every device costs money and carries risk.
And with remote or hybrid teams growing and compliance rules becoming more strict (with tangible penalties for non-compliance) getting back to the basics of hardware visibility is becoming more important again.
Especially considering a recent Gartner study, which claimed about 30% of all hardware is either underused or missing in many organisations.
Are you really confident in your hardware visibility?
When you’re running thousands of devices across departments, offices, home set ups and even borders, visibility is difficult. Laptops are left in drawers when people leave. Monitors disappear. Some IT assets never even make it onto your books and you’re left with a network of Shadow IT.
Taking the data from Gartner’s research, if you have 5,000 devices, about 1,500 of them will be untracked.
That’s 1,500 devices you can’t see (so can’t manage) which may still hold company data, carry a live software licence, or are costing money in support fees.
This also creates an issue of trust. If IT teams doubt their own asset data, they can’t plan or report with any confidence.
Although you may see it as “old-hat”, hardware visibility isn’t admin. It’s the base of good IT management.
You can’t secure what you can’t see
Wasted spending is bad enough. But the biggest risk of poor hardware visibility is the element of unseen risk.
The same Gartner study found that 76% of IT leaders noted that a lack of a common view of applications or hardware assets across security and IT teams led to a vulnerability.
If you can’t see the hardware asset, you can’t remove the vulnerability.
And this isn’t just theory. In 2017 the NHS fell victim to a ransomware attack (known as the WannaCry attack) as a result of old operating systems being left unpatched because there was no clear record of where the the devices with the outdated OS where.
With proper asset data, this attack could have been avoided.
Hardware visibility still plays a huge part in IT security. It can show you exactly where risks sit, so teams can act before any trouble starts.
Is hardware lifecycle management overlooked?
As well as improving security, hardware visibility also saves time and money.
IT teams still using spreadsheets are more likely to be spending time chasing data, rather than actually managing assets.
Meanwhile you have people leaving with company laptops and other equipment. And new hires waiting weeks for equipment that’s sitting in storage.
With proper visibility and live hardware tracking, IT teams can more easily see which devices are active, which need (or will soon need) repair, and which can be reused. That means longer lifespans, fewer unnecessary purchases and less waste.
With hardware, visibility brings more control, and this control helps cut costs.
Ending the spreadsheet era of hardware visibility
Manually tracking hardware is slow, and error-prone. Especially in large organisations with complex digital estates.
Modern IT asset management tools pull live information from every device into one dashboard.
IT, security and finance all work from the same, real-time records and anyone can quickly check who owns a device, what’s installed, how it’s being used and if it’s up-to-date.
With new technology, like the AI-powered search in CerteroX, it’s even quicker. You can simply ask plain language questions about your hardware estate and get explainable answers directly from your database – rather than manually searching.
This stops the drift between what assets you have recorded, and what’s actually happening in the real-world.
Using this information you make faster decisions, create clear audit trails and free up resources for more strategic tasks.
Hardware visibility: The foundation of ITAM maturity
Many companies focus on Software Asset Management first, thinking this is where the biggest opportunity is.
But in reality, without accurate hardware visibility, software data is unreliable.
Every licence, patch and configuration depends on a physical device.
Reliable hardware tracking can strengthen everything from software accuracy, service-desk speed, budgeting and security.
If the hardware visibility layer is off, every linked process is too.
So hardware visibility should often be the start of a mature ITAM practice.
The price of ignoring hardware visibility
One of the biggest problems with data management is that if people don’t trust it, they stop maintaining it. Because what’s the point?
As a result, reports become guesswork. Decisions are made using stale or incorrect numbers.
Lack of visibility wastes money, and creates risks around security and governance.
Everything from unpatched assets, ongoing licences for ex-employees and skewed budgets or lack of ownership all stem from poor visibility.
The longer this all lasts, the harder, more expensive it becomes to fix.
Closing the visibility gap
Adding more monitoring tools rarely helps when it comes to closing your ITAM visibility gap. Instead, focus on linking what you already use.
A single ITAM dashboard gives everyone the same view.
When visibility improves:
- Security teams patch faster.
- Finance teams plan better.
- IT teams recover and reuse assets.
Instead of being a box-ticking exercise, hardware visibility actually creates genuine business value.
This is something we worked to achieve with a Commissioning Support Unit in the UK, which works with more than one hundred organisations including clinical commissioning groups, hospital trusts and GP practices.
The organisation was managing hundreds of devices, but needed visibility, including tracking which devices users have, locating lost devices, remote wiping and locking capabilities, plus configuring settings on devices like WiFi, VPN, email and key security policies.
We first provided them with a proof of concept to prove our capabilities, before setting them up on a platform that now provides complete visibility across all their mobile devices, without needing huge amounts of technical resources or management.
Visibility and control of IT assets
Digital tools and services still rely on hardware. Ignoring it can weaken security, waste money and lead to poor decision making.
Whether you’re trying to stop another WannaCry attack or just recover invisible assets you’ve lost track of, you can’t protect or manage what you can’t see.
So the first step is regaining accurate visibility of your digital estate.
Check how much of your hardware estate you can actually account for.
List what’s missing, unused, or outdated.
Then decide what needs fixing to get a full, accurate view.
Find out more about our Asset Visibility services.
