Breaking the Swivel Chair Cycle: Why Security Teams Struggle with Asset Visibility—and How to Fix It

For many security professionals, managing asset visibility feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. They are stuck in what experts call the “swivel chair approach”—constantly pivoting between multiple dashboards, spreadsheets, and security tools to manually stitch together an understanding of their risk landscape. Despite significant investments in scanning technologies, many organizations still struggle to form a clear, unified view of their assets, leaving them vulnerable to security blind spots, inefficiencies, and unaddressed risks. 

So why does asset visibility remain such a challenge? And more importantly, how can organizations move past the swivel chair approach to achieve real, risk-driven security operations? 

Too Many Tools, Not Enough Context 

The modern IT environment is more complex than ever, managing a mix of on-prem infrastructure, cloud environments, ephemeral assets, and third-party integrations. Adam Dudley and Aaron Attarzadeh discussed the topic in our recent webinar, From Disparate Data to Unified Risk Insights: The Role of Asset Correlation in Vulnerability Management.  

During the webinar, they acknowledged how each of these components generates its own data streams, feeding into a sprawl of scanning tools that often operate in silos. This becomes problematic when so many enterprises employ several scanning platforms, sometimes over a dozen, with each platform providing visibility into only a part of the environment. 

Security teams attempting to correlate data manually often resort to spreadsheets or SIEMs, but these methods come with significant limitations. SIEMs, for example, focus on real-time data and may not provide the historical context necessary for comprehensive risk analysis. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, are time-consuming, error-prone, and do not scale effectively.

The Cost of Fragmented Asset Visibility 

When security teams lack a single source of truth for their assets, several problems emerge: 

• Inconsistent Data: Different scanning tools categorize assets in unique ways, making it difficult to align datasets and prioritize vulnerabilities effectively. 
• Missed Security Gaps: Without correlation, critical vulnerabilities may go undetected or unresolved simply because they are buried under an avalanche of disconnected data. 
• Inefficient Remediation: Security teams waste valuable time chasing false positives, duplicating efforts, and manually reconciling findings across systems instead of focusing on actual risk reduction. 
• Unclear Reporting to Leadership: CISOs need clear, quantifiable insights to report risk to executives, but disparate data sources make it difficult to present an accurate security posture. 

Aaron put it best during the webinar. “It’s like the Spider Man meme where you’re looking at two different data sources and you’re saying, “Who’s right?” You’re confused and you literally don’t know what to do. This is a constant conversation we’re having. The whole point of correlation and normalization in Nucleus is to come to a happy medium so that the Spider Man meme doesn’t exist.” 

Moving Toward Unified Asset Correlation 

Breaking free from the swivel chair cycle requires a shift from fragmented, tool-specific asset management to a centralized, metadata-driven approach. Instead of treating each scanner as an isolated source of truth, organizations should leverage asset correlation platforms to unify data streams and create a single, contextualized view of risk. 

Here’s how: 

1. Automate Asset Correlation Across Data Sources. Security teams must integrate all scanning tools into a centralized risk management platform that can deduplicate, normalize, and correlate asset data. This ensures that different scans of the same resource (e.g., a VM scanned by both an endpoint agent and an authenticated vulnerability scanner) are combined into a single, enriched asset profile. 
2. Leverage Metadata for Contextual Prioritization. Asset metadata—such as cloud resource tags, production vs. staging designations, and security group associations—provides crucial context for prioritization. For example, an easy win for security teams is leveraging AWS accouwnt IDs or other metadata fields to distinguish between production and staging assets. That alone can make a huge impact on remediation focus. 
3. Move Beyond CVSS-Only Prioritization. While CVSS scores are useful, they don’t tell the full story. Security teams should incorporate real-world exploitability, asset criticality, and network exposure into their prioritization strategy. We need to stop treating every critical CVSS score as an emergency. If a vulnerability exists on a non-public, internal-only asset, it shouldn’t be treated with the same urgency as one on an internet-facing production server. 
4. Improve Reporting with Real-Time Risk Insights. By eliminating manual data consolidation and centralizing asset intelligence, security teams can generate more accurate, real-time risk reports. This improves communication with leadership and ensures that remediation efforts align with business-critical risks. 

A Future Without Swivel Chairs 

The days of security teams manually toggling between tools to cobble together a risk picture should be behind us. By adopting automated asset correlation and prioritization strategies, organizations can gain the clarity they need to proactively reduce vulnerabilities and strengthen their security posture. 

You don’t want to be stuck sifting through spreadsheets when the next Log4j-level vulnerability drops. You need to know, in real time, what’s affected, where it lives, and how critical it really is. 

For security teams still struggling with fragmented asset visibility, the time to break the swivel chair cycle is now. The tools and methodologies exist—it’s just a matter of putting them to work. We encourage you to watch the full webinar replay to learn more.