Closing the Coverage Gap: A Practical Approach to Better Security Oversight

This blog explores how coverage gaps, assets missing the security tools you thought were deployed, create blind spots that attackers exploit. It highlights Nagomi’s enhanced coverage gap capabilities that help teams detect, prioritize, and remediate these risks at scale.

Closing the Coverage Gap: A Practical Approach to Better Security Oversight

In enterprise security, one scenario repeats itself all too often: you deploy an EDR across your fleet, configure your vulnerability scanner, and set up your MDM solution, only to find weeks later that several critical machines were never covered. Maybe it’s a developer’s custom Linux box, or a legacy server running an outdated OS that your standard deployment scripts couldn’t reach. These coverage gaps aren’t just technical oversights. They create points in your environment where security controls are missing and risk increases.

Before security teams can start fixing misconfigurations or tuning controls, the foundation of exposure management is answering a basic question: are the tools we’ve invested in actually deployed?

Coverage gaps, or lack of deployment, are exposures in their own right. Every asset missing a required tool increases the attack surface and raises the organization’s overall risk.

That’s why we’re introducing our enhanced coverage gap capabilities. This is a significant step forward in how security teams can identify, track, and resolve coverage issues across infrastructure at scale.

Coverage Gaps: The Opportunity Attackers Count On

A coverage gap occurs when an asset in your environment does not have the expected security controls or monitoring in place. It’s the difference between your security policy on paper and what is actually deployed in production. While we often think of coverage gaps in terms of physical endpoints, they extend far beyond traditional devices to encompass your entire digital infrastructure.

Endpoint Gaps That Slip Through

The most familiar coverage gaps occur at the endpoint level. Examples include:

• A Mac laptop not managed by Jamf
• A Windows server without the vulnerability scanning agent
• A cloud instance without EDR installed
• A newly provisioned machine not yet included in security tooling during its build phase

Identity and Governance Gaps That Undermine Protection

Coverage gaps are not limited to endpoints. They can be equally problematic in identity and governance systems, occurring when accounts that should be managed by your core platforms are missing required protections. For example, Nagomi can identify active human Azure AD (Entra) users that are not covered by Microsoft Purview policies. These gaps prevent enforcement of critical safeguards and block consistent monitoring, logging, and lifecycle management.

Why Even One Gap Puts You at Risk

Wherever they exist, coverage gaps create significant risks because they:

• Expand the attack surface: every unmonitored asset, whether a device or user account, is a potential entry point
• Create compliance exposure: regulations often require complete coverage across all systems and users
• Limit operational awareness: you cannot protect what you cannot see, whether it is a server or a service account
• Waste resources: security tools provide value only when deployed everywhere they are needed

Left unaddressed, these gaps can become invisible backdoors that attackers exploit to bypass even the most well-deployed defenses. Comprehensive coverage across all asset types is essential for maintaining a strong security program.

Closing Gaps Before Attackers Find Them

You can define security posture requirements without complex queries or rigid templates. Whether it’s requiring CrowdStrike on all Mac endpoints, mandating vulnerability scanning on Windows servers, ensuring multi-layered protection on production systems, or confirming that all privileged accounts are present in Azure AD, the platform adapts to your needs.

Enterprise environments are rarely uniform. In one healthcare deployment, newly provisioned machines needed a 48-hour grace period before being flagged. The system supports these exceptions so teams can align monitoring with real-world processes.

With our new rules page, you can edit Nagomi’s default coverage rules or create your own, defining each rule’s asset scope, the specific assets from your inventory that should be covered and included in the analysis.

Intelligence and Workflows That Drive Action

The upgraded intelligence layer provides a clearer operational view than ever before:

• Rule performance analytics to measure deployment success across different asset types and business units
• Historical coverage data to see when and where gaps appear, revealing patterns and root causes
• Asset-level insight to identify exactly which systems require remediation
• Risky combinations of missing tools that compound risk

As our Co-Founder and CPO Shai Mendel explains, “From the main view, you can see rule performance at a glance. Click on a rule to view its history, identify assets with coverage drift, and open a remediation ticket right from there. It closes the loop between detection and resolution.”

With direct workflow integration, gaps move into your existing ticketing process in seconds. For organizations with multiple business units, the ability to filter analytics by domain ensures both local accountability and centralized oversight.

What Security Teams Are Saying

Security teams using the enhanced coverage gap capabilities are already seeing measurable improvements in efficiency, focus, and risk reduction.

One customer explained, “The biggest benefit is seeing coverage gaps on endpoints in one view. We can immediately spot assets missing required tools, focus on non-standard setups, and fix what needs attention. These would have been missed before.”

They went on to share how the capability fits into their broader workflow: “It is so valuable to see, under one pane of glass, all our assets, both users and endpoints, that are regularly checking in or missing a specific tool. This helps us focus on unique configurations and systems that need attention. These would have slipped through unnoticed before.”

Another customer shared: “The Vulnerabilities view with the Impacted Assets Breakdown is incredibly helpful. It takes the hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities from Tenable, correlates them with our other defense capabilities, and highlights the threats that truly matter. One of the biggest differentiators is the filter for missing EDR coverage. We use our knowledge of where controls aren’t in place to prioritize which vulnerabilities require action. Instead of drowning in a sea of generic ‘critical’ alerts like in other tools, we can zero in on exposures that actually put us at risk.”

Others emphasized the impact on day-to-day operations: “Having all our security tool data pulled into one view and immediately spotting assets missing coverage is a game changer. It quickly surfaces non-standard machines, outdated operating systems, or gaps we didn’t know existed, things that could easily become serious risks if left unchecked.”

The impact has been both operational and strategic: “These capabilities give us manageable action items each week to steadily increase our cybersecurity maturity without overwhelming the team.”

This feedback underscores the core value, the enhanced capabilities aren’t about ticking boxes. They are about uncovering risks teams didn’t know existed, correlating those risks with the rest of their security program, and enabling resolution before they can lead to incidents.

From Reactive to Proactive

Security teams often discover coverage issues only after an incident. With these enhanced capabilities:

• Issues are addressed during routine operations, not during crisis response
• Teams work from a prioritized list of real coverage issues, not a flood of low-value alerts
• Coverage data is tied directly into remediation workflows, making action part of the normal operational cycle
  

As one customer summed it up, “These give us manageable action items each week to improve security maturity without overwhelming the team.”

Coverage as a Measure of Program Maturity

Coverage has become a key success metric in our Proof-of-Value engagements. Accurate, comprehensive coverage visibility enables teams to:

• Quantify risk in business terms
• Direct resources toward the most impactful issues
• Show measurable progress in reducing exposure
• Streamline compliance by proving control deployment across assets
• Maximize return on security investments by ensuring the tools you’ve already purchased are fully deployed and delivering value

Nagomi’s enhanced coverage gap capabilities integrate with your existing security stack, correlating control performance, asset data, and workflows into a single operational view. This is a step forward in giving security operations teams the precision, context, and agility they need to ensure no asset is left unprotected.

If you’d like to see these capabilities in action, we can walk you through real examples from environments like yours.

Watch our walkthrough or request a demo to see how we help teams surface what matters, skip the noise, and finally prove they’re protected.