Most enterprises assume their asset inventory is close enough to accurate. The evidence suggests otherwise. According to a survey of over 600 security leaders in the 2026 Axonius Actionability Report, only 45% of organizations consolidate their asset and exposure data into a single view, and every downstream security program inherits whatever the inventory gets wrong.
Lumen Technologies, a telecommunications company with nearly a century of history, put this to the test. Geoff Krahn, Director of Product and Platform Security at Lumen, and his team used the Axonius asset intelligence platform to reconcile data from more than 40 disconnected systems into one trusted view. They uncovered 60 times more devices than they knew they had, then rebuilt their exposure management program on that foundation.
Why asset inventories break down at enterprise scale
Lumen’s environment is an extreme case of a problem most security teams recognize. More than 40 independent IT and security tools tracked different slices of reality at different levels of maturity, none agreeing on device counts, ownership, or coverage status. When leadership asked what percentage of servers had EDR, answering meant pulling from sources that contradicted each other.
“We were constantly in incident response calls with no idea who owned what,” Krahn said.
Axonius gave the team a way to reconcile all of those sources into one model. The scope turned out to be far larger than anyone expected:
- Starting point: ~17,000 known cyber assets across existing inventories
- After initial reconciliation: 500,000 devices identified and categorized
- Current scope: Approximately 1.1 million devices
“It has really been an eye-opener for the organization as a whole how large our responsibilities are,” Krahn said. “Being able to quantify it and highlight gaps in controls has allowed us to gain the leadership support and funding we need.”
What trusted asset data makes possible
Zero-day response
When a critical vulnerability drops, speed depends on knowing what’s exposed and who owns it. Krahn’s team can now identify affected systems, confirm whether they’re externally exposed, and establish ownership within minutes, then push alerts to engineers through a chatbot built on top of Axonius.
“Being able to get near-instantaneous information on how many assets are susceptible to a 0-day vuln, who owns them, are they externally exposed… is pivotal to timely response and communication,” Krahn said.
Application posture visibility
Lumen runs thousands of internal applications. Knowing whether a server is patched doesn’t answer what it supports, who owns the application on it, or what revenue stream a compromise would put at risk.
By correlating CMDB relationships with control coverage, vulnerability data, and end-of-life status, Lumen built an Application Posture Dashboard within Axonius that evaluates risk at the application level rather than the infrastructure level alone. Krahn plans to…
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