Energy firm reduces exposure by 64% to drive cyber resilience

Modern cyber risk management demands more than just surface-level visibility – it requires robust, continuous insights into asset coverage, control gaps, and risk exposure.

For this global energy management firm, gaps in visibility and fragmented processes were putting security and compliance at risk. The cybersecurity team struggled to:

• Maintain a trusted, up-to-date view of assets and control coverage across the business
• Identify on- and off-boarding failures, such as missing security agents on newly provisioned or decommissioned devices
• Track whether users requesting local admin access met the zero-vulnerability requirement
• Monitor compliance with internal patching policies and SLAs - especially after transitioning to Microsoft Defender

Without centralized visibility, the team couldn’t accurately quantify risk, enforce policies, or hold stakeholders accountable. Cyber risk management became a time-consuming, reactive process – dependent on manual effort and assumptions.

These security and operational gaps had far-reaching consequences:

• Security blind spots: Without visibility into agent deployment or patch performance, the team couldn’t confirm coverage or act swiftly on vulnerabilities, leaving assets exposed.
• Breakdown in accountability: Since the patching process sat outside the security team’s control, it was impossible to validate remediation or enforce governance.
• Compliance at risk: Incomplete or unreliable asset and vulnerability data undermined their ability to meet control requirements and put key certifications, like Cyber Essentials, at risk.
• Slow process and user friction: Without a way to map vulnerabilities to individual users, enforcing zero-vulnerability policies for local admin access became slow, manual, and inconsistent – introducing unnecessary security risk.

With Panaseer in place, the team now has the trusted insights they need to improve risk posture, streamline compliance, and embed accountability across teams.

Increased value of existing tools
Panaseer provides a single source of truth for the most accurate record of their assets and controls coverage, enhancing the coverage of existing security tooling investments.

• Improved coverage of key cyber tools by 68% on average
• Increased ITSM inventory coverage by 45%

Reduced exposure risk
Correlation of fragmented data across siloed teams with the ability to track progress over time enables and proves the organization's progress in reducing the average exposure time of vulnerability detections that can be patched to avoid attacker exploitation.

• Reduced the average age of exploitable and patchable detections by 64%
• Reduced devices with critical vulns by 46%
• Reduced total server vulnerability detections by 64%

Empowered users and clear accountability
Users can self-serve dashboards to verify their vulnerability status before requesting local admin access – a new, streamlined process embedded into the onboarding process, shifting ownership to the individual.

Additional wins

Faster response, reduced exposure
The team is now alerted to critical vulnerabilities in near real time, such as devices missing from update cycles due to user behavior like improper shutdowns.

They have the data to validate successful patching cycles, not just hope. Historical trendlines provide critical insights into the effectiveness of remediation, so that it’s not just reported, but validated as providing real improvements in security posture.

Conclusion

With Panaseer, this global organization has built a foundation of trusted insight, continuous validation, and shared accountability. As threats and compliance demands evolve, they’re now positioned to respond with confidence, backed by data – not assumptions.