Customers
Elite Research University
An Elite Research University Runs End-to-End Asset and Vulnerability Management on Cogent
A leading research university runs its asset management and vulnerability management program on Cogent, from one inventory to fixes routed to the people who own them.
160K+
Assets unified into one inventory
88%
Reduction in assets without owners
99%
Less noise for the people doing the fixing
The Customer
Hundreds of Teams, One Security Office
The customer is one of the world’s leading research universities. Its schools, departments and research groups handle sensitive data ranging from student records to health information and government-funded research.
IT at the university is deeply decentralized. Schools, departments, labs and individual researchers run their own systems, on campus and in the cloud. A central Information Security Office finds vulnerabilities, but the people who can fix them sit across hundreds of independent teams.
The Challenge
A Program Without a Platform
The university had no platform for asset management, vulnerability management or visibility into what was exposed to the internet. Its scanner, cloud security platform and endpoint tools each reported thousands of findings, in separate consoles with separate workflows for on-premises and cloud systems.
The environment made that harder to fix. Systems spanned multiple schools, central IT, departmental IT teams, research labs and individual faculty, across data centers, endpoints and cloud accounts. The person who owns a system is often not the one who administers it, many administrators aren’t IT staff, and enforcement falls to distributed units wary of disrupting research.
Ownership information lived in many different places. Without a unified view, the team had no way to see which machines had no owner at all, or why. When automated emails to registered owners went unanswered, the process stopped there.
Scanner severity ratings buried real risk in noise, and fixed didn’t always mean fixed. Systems that had already been upgraded still showed as vulnerable, which created follow-up work for the security office and the teams it was chasing.
The Solution
A Clear Path From Finding to Fix
The university connected Cogent to its vulnerability scanner, cloud security platform, endpoint detection, network registration database and campus directory. Cogent combines those sources into one inventory across on-premises, endpoint and cloud systems, with internet exposure in the same view, so asset management and vulnerability management run end to end on a single platform.
The security office co-designed the rollout with Cogent. It set the routing rules and success criteria itself, which let the platform fit how a decentralized university works across its schools and teams.
Ownership came first, because a finding without an owner has nowhere to go. Cogent ties each asset to its department, technical owner and principal investigator. Any asset it can’t attribute is flagged with the reason, so the team can see exactly where the gaps are.
Cogent’s risk score weighs exploitability, internet exposure, compensating controls and business context instead of raw CVSS, and explains every score in plain language. Findings flow into the Action Queue with remediation guidance attached, then route to the owner first, the technical contact second and the security office as a fallback. Cogent closes work only after a follow-up scan confirms the fix, and flags or escalates any fix that doesn’t take.
The Results
The Whole Program on One Platform
More than 160,000 assets across on-premises, endpoint and cloud sources now sit in a single inventory, with ownership and internet exposure in the same view. The security office manages assets and vulnerabilities in one place instead of across separate consoles.
Cogent cut the number of assets without an owner by 88%. The remaining gaps are specific and short, with most unowned cloud assets tracing back to a small number of accounts missing ownership tags.
The risk score narrowed tens of thousands of vulnerabilities rated critical by CVSS to a few hundred that are critical in the university’s environment, cutting the noise for the people doing the fixing by 99%.
Owners now act on their own work. Departmental IT teams work their findings directly in Cogent instead of waiting on the central team, and reminders and escalation have replaced the security office’s manual follow-up. Because the security office set the rules, the same model extends to new schools and teams as they come on board.
With Cogent, the university runs asset management and vulnerability management end to end on one platform, built around getting vulnerabilities fixed.
