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.
