Executive Summary
Every enterprise today runs on a complex mix of cloud workloads, hybrid environments, and third-party integrations. But the truth is, what you can’t see, you can’t secure.
When a global financial services company discovered that nearly 18 % of its cloud footprint was unmanaged and invisible to its existing tools, it turned to PerimeterFence to regain control. Within weeks, shadow assets were identified, classified, and risk-ranked, reducing the organization’s attack surface by 73%.
The Challenge
As enterprises expand across multi-cloud infrastructures, unmanaged cloud assets have become one of the most overlooked cybersecurity threats.
In this case, the company’s rapid adoption of containerized applications, test environments, and cloud-native services created blind spots. Some workloads were spun up for short-term projects and forgotten. Others remained untagged, misconfigured, or outside centralized monitoring.
The result was a fragmented security posture, where:
- Several public-facing instances lacked up-to-date patches.
- API endpoints were accessible without strong authentication.
- Security teams had no unified view of the actual external attack surface.
This visibility gap not only exposed sensitive data but also made compliance reporting nearly impossible.
The Discovery
Using PerimeterFence, the enterprise initiated a full-spectrum discovery across all known and unknown cloud zones.
The platform’s AI-driven asset correlation engine mapped every public-facing IP, domain, and endpoint within minutes. What surfaced was alarming:
- Over 2,400 active cloud instances were not listed in the central CMDB.
- Nearly 200 exposed storage buckets were accessible via weak credentials.
- Multiple legacy workloads were running in regions outside compliance jurisdictions.
PerimeterFence’s unified dashboard provided a clear picture of the attack surface in real time, connecting assets, owners, and exposure levels in a single interface.
The Solution
The organization leveraged PerimeterFence’s automated asset classification and risk prioritization engine to bring control back to the cloud perimeter.
Key actions taken:
- Discovery to Containment: Shadow assets were discovered, tagged, and mapped to their business units automatically.
- Exposure Prioritization: Assets with critical vulnerabilities or open ports were escalated for immediate remediation.
- Policy Enforcement: PerimeterFence integrated with the enterprise’s existing SIEM and IAM tools to apply access rules in real time.
- Continuous Monitoring: The system established automated watchlists for newly created or decommissioned instances, preventing future blind spots.
Within 14 days, all unmonitored cloud assets were identified and secured, with real-time alerts configured to prevent recurrence.
The Results
The deployment of PerimeterFence delivered measurable business impact:
- 73% reduction in shadow IT exposure across global regions.
- Zero critical vulnerabilities remaining in unmanaged cloud workloads.
- Complete asset visibility achieved within 2 weeks of deployment.
- Significant compliance improvement, streamlining audit readiness for ISO and SOC frameworks.
Security teams could now move from reactive firefighting to proactive governance with confidence that their external surface was continuously mapped and protected.
Key Takeaways
- Forgotten cloud assets are not rare; they are inevitable in multi-cloud operations.
- Visibility is the foundation of resilience, you cannot defend what you cannot detect.
- Continuous discovery and automated enforcement are the only sustainable solutions against expanding attack surfaces.
- Tools like PerimeterFence transform reactive cloud security into proactive cyber governance.
Conclusion
Forgotten assets are silent threats,hidden in test environments, old storage buckets, and inactive workloads. What differentiates leading enterprises today is not the number of tools they use but how fast they can detect what others overlook.
PerimeterFence by Saptang Labs ensures that every corner of your cloud perimeter is visible, monitored, and secure before an adversary finds it first.
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