Thinking you’re compliant is one thing — proving it is another. Here’s how one organization with an already-strong security posture used ASCERA to catch silent failures before they turned into real risk.
Setting the Scene
A higher education research lab with government contracts had already built a mature security program aligned with NIST 800-171. On the surface, things looked solid. But during ASCERA implementation, something unexpected surfaced: multiple active devices were out of compliance with vulnerability scanning timelines — and no one had noticed.
ASCERA in Action
Once deployed, ASCERA’s automation kicked in. With connectors live and compliance logic mapped to the environment, ASCERA automatically evaluated scan logs against for 3.11.2, which this organization required systems to be scanned within 7 days.
The platform quickly flagged several systems that hadn’t been scanned in over 30 days, even though they were still in use. Investigation revealed that the scanning agents had failed silently, giving the appearance of compliance without actual coverage.
What Would’ve Happened Without ASCERA?
This organization was unknowingly operating with broken agents and outdated scan data. ASCERA exposed this false sense of compliance before it turned into an official finding.
Left unchecked, these gaps could have resulted in audit failures, POA&Ms, or worse: unmonitored vulnerabilities across live assets. From a security perspective, that’s a dangerous blind spot, especially in research environments working with sensitive data.
Moving Forward with ASCERA’s Continuous Controls Monitoring
Thanks to ASCERA’s real-time monitoring and automated logic, the organization was able to pinpoint the root cause, address the issue, and tighten its compliance workflow moving forward. Now, they’ll receive immediate alerts when any control drifts out of compliance — not after the damage is done.