In most organizations today, it’s easier to spin up new technology than it is to ask permission. A user can subscribe to a new SaaS platform and upload bunch of sensitive data in an hour, or a developer can ship working code with help from an AI assistant in a single afternoon. None of that requires a ticket, an architecture review, or a line in the CMDB. On one hand, that speed is exactly what the business wants. On the other, it quietly creates assets that sit outside the normal security and IT processes—sometimes known, often not, and almost always riskier than anyone assumes.​

Unknown vs. Unmanaged

Most organizations lump all “bad asset situations” into one bucket, but there’s a meaningful distinction that matters for how you think about risk.

• Unmanaged assets are the things you know about but don’t control well.
  They’re in a CMDB or inventory or at least show up in a scan, but they’re missing patches, running outdated configs, or not covered by your normal processes. You can point to them on a list, even if that list is a little ugly.

• Unknown assets are the things that are used an processing data, but not documented. No inventory record. No owner. No monitoring. Often no ticket ever opened. Examples include a marketing team’s SaaS tool, a “temporary” database that stuck around, or a contractor’s cloud environment that never got folded into standard governance.

Both types expand your attack surface. But only one of them is invisible to your own decision-making.

Why Unmanaged Risk Is Still Better Than Invisible Risk

Let’s talk about how a security or risk team actually operates.

With unmanaged assets, the situation might be bad, but at least it’s knowably bad:

• You can say, “We have 500 servers, and 120 are behind on patches.”

• You can identify which ones handle sensitive data and prioritize.

• You can plug those realities into a risk model, argue over acceptable levels of exposure, and decide where to spend time and money.

In other words, unmanaged assets give you something to measure, rank, and improve. Even if you’re underwater on backlog, you’re dealing with risk that’s on the table.

With unknown assets, there is no table:

• They don’t show up in your dashboards, risk registers, or maturity assessments.

• They’re not in the scope of your control framework, compliance boundary, or tabletop exercises.

• Leadership believes they’re making informed decisions based on “the estate,” but a meaningful slice of that estate is missing from the picture.

This is the core problem: unknown assets distort your entire understanding of risk. You’re not just exposed—you’re exposed in ways that your own models actively hide from you.

How Unknown Assets Actually Get Created

Unknown assets don’t appear because people are reckless; they appear because people are trying to get work done.

Common patterns:

• Shadow IT and “just get it done” culture
  A team needs a tool now, not in three months after procurement and architecture reviews. So they swipe a credit card for a SaaS platform or stand up a cloud resource themselves.

• Organic growth in the cloud
  Someone spins up a “temporary” environment for testing. It gains a user or two. Eventually, it’s quietly serving production traffic, but nobody ever circled back to add it to inventory.

• M&A, contractors, and one-off projects
  You inherit systems, integrations, or data flows that don’t fit cleanly into your existing asset model. They work, so they get left alone, undocumented.

None of this is malicious. It’s simply what happens when the speed of the business outpaces the speed of governance. But each one of these decisions creates a pocket of infrastructure that’s effectively invisible to security.

Risk Is About Models, Not Just Controls

Most conversations about asset management go straight to patching, configuration baselines, and hardening standards. Those are important, but they all assume something more fundamental: that you know what’s out there.

Before you talk about controls, you’re really talking about a model of your environment:

• What assets do we have?

• Where are they?

• Who owns them?

• How critical are they?

If your model is incomplete, all your downstream work—maturity scoring, risk quantification, control mapping—rests on a shaky foundation. You can have a beautifully managed subset of assets and still be blindsided by the ones that never made it into your universe of discourse.

From a risk perspective, moving an asset from unknown → known but unmanaged is already a big win. Once it’s known, you can:

• Assign an owner.

• Put it in scope for monitoring and logging.

• Factor it into your risk calculations and prioritization.

You haven’t fixed everything yet, but you’ve dragged that asset out of the dark and into a place where conscious decisions can be made.

A Simple Maturity Lens: Where Are You Really?

It can help to think in rough levels:

• Level 1: Unknown-heavy environment
  Assets regularly show up for the first time during incidents, pen tests, or audits. Every major investigation uncovers “surprises.”

• Level 2: Known but partially unmanaged
  Most assets appear somewhere in inventory, but there are patching gaps, weak ownership, and inconsistent control coverage. The problems are visible, even if they aren’t fully solved.

• Level 3: Known and deliberately governed
  Assets are identified, owned, and tied into consistent processes. Risk decisions are made with a reasonably complete view of the estate.

Moving from Level 1 to Level 2 doesn’t sound glamorous—you’re going from “unknown” to “known but ugly”—but it’s where a huge chunk of risk reduction actually lives.

Think back to any serious incident you’ve been part of or read about. When responders start pulling logs and tracing flow, how often do they bump into a system or service they didn’t know existed? That “oh, what’s that?” moment is usually an unknown asset revealing itself under stress.

Now ask: what if that same asset had at least been known, even if it was in bad shape?

• Maybe it would have been in scope for MFA, logging, or network segmentation.

• Maybe it would have a designated owner who could make a fast decision.

• Maybe it would have shown up as a high-risk item in a risk review, triggering attention before an attacker found it.

Unmanaged assets give you a chance to intervene. Unknown assets don’t.

So Which Is the Greater Risk?

Both unknown and unmanaged assets increase your exposure, but they’re not equal.

• Unmanaged means: “We know this thing exists and we’re not handling it well (yet).”

• Unknown means: “This thing exists, and we’ve given it zero thought. It doesn’t exist in our planning, reporting, or trade-off decisions.”

Unmanaged assets are a backlog of work. Unknown assets are a blind spot.

If the goal is to make better risk decisions, the first control isn’t a new patching tool or a new framework—it’s shining light on the assets you don’t even know you have. Until an asset is known, it isn’t just unmanaged; it’s unmanageable.