Why ITAM maturity is becoming a security priority
Darren Desmond, CISO at The AA, said something on bedigital’s The Tech Leaders Podcast, that perfectly captures the relationship between security and ITAM:
“You can’t get security without IT asset management being in place and effective.”
It is a simple point, but one we see reflected constantly when working with enterprise organisations.
Most organisations are investing heavily in security tooling. Vulnerability management, endpoint detection, cloud security, SIEM, attack surface management. The stack keeps growing.
What is often missing is confidence in the visibility underneath it all.
Because when vulnerability scans miss systems, when patching slows down, or when audits become reactive exercises, the issue is rarely the tooling itself.
It is visibility into the technology estate.
The security problem that often starts with ITAM
Security teams usually experience the symptoms first.
Assets missing from vulnerability scans. Devices with unclear ownership. Different systems showing conflicting data. Audit requests turning into manual exercises.
Individually, these can feel like operational frustrations.
Together, they often point to a broader issue: the organisation does not have a mature understanding of its own estate.
That is where IT asset management maturity becomes critical.
Not simply as a compliance or operational function, but as a core part of reducing risk and maintaining control.
As Renata Vincoletto, CISO at Civica, said on our Tech Leaders Podcast:
“I can’t protect what I don’t know [about].”
That challenge is becoming more significant as enterprise environments continue to grow in complexity.
More tooling does not automatically create more control
This is where many organisations get stuck.
The instinct is often to add another security tool to improve visibility. Another dashboard. Another scanning layer. Another monitoring capability.
But security tooling is only as effective as the asset data feeding into it.
If estate data is fragmented, duplicated, outdated, or missing ownership, security teams are still making decisions based on incomplete context. Trend Micro’s 2025 global study of over 2,000 cybersecurity leaders found that 74% experienced security incidents caused by unknown or unmanaged assets.
We regularly see organisations investing heavily in security controls while still struggling to answer fundamental questions:
- What assets do we actually have?
- Which systems are unsupported?
- Who owns them?
- Which data source should we trust?
Those gaps create operational friction, but they also create risk.
Where mature ITAM changes the conversation
Mature ITAM improves the quality, consistency, and reliability of the data security teams depend on.
It creates better visibility across hardware, software, cloud, and SaaS environments, while improving ownership, governance, and confidence in vulnerability and risk reporting.
That is often the point where organisations move from reacting to issues to proactively managing risk.
Security teams spend less time questioning the data and more time acting on it.
The complexity of the environment may not disappear, but the uncertainty reduces significantly.
Why security teams are paying more attention to ITAM maturity
Enterprise estates are expanding rapidly across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, hybrid environments, and decentralised ownership models.
At the same time, security and risk teams are under increasing pressure to demonstrate control, reduce exposure, and respond faster to threats.
That becomes extremely difficult when visibility across the estate is inconsistent. The catastrophic ransomware attack on Marks & Spencer proved this risk last year when hackers targeted its logistics systems, completely freezing online sales for six weeks at an estimated cost of £3.5 million per day and ultimately driving an annual profit slump of nearly 24%, according to ITV News.
Increasingly, organisations are recognising that ITAM maturity is not just an operational concern.
It directly impacts security posture, governance, compliance readiness, and operational resilience.
Final thought
The organisations making the biggest progress in security are usually not the ones with the most tools.
They are the ones with the clearest understanding of their technology estate.
That is ultimately what mature ITAM provides: trusted visibility, clearer ownership, stronger governance, and better operational control.
Because before organisations can secure, govern, patch, monitor, or optimise anything, they first need confidence in what they actually have.
Want to understand where you stand?
At bedigital, we help organisations independently assess and improve their ITAM maturity to strengthen visibility, governance, and operational control across the technology estate.
Our ITAM maturity assessment helps identify gaps in asset visibility, ownership, process maturity, and data quality, and highlights where those gaps may be impacting security and risk outcomes.
If you would like a clearer picture of your current state, we would be happy to talk.
