New Nagomi Report Finds Incomplete Multi-Factor Authentication, Endpoint Detection, and Policy Enforcement Are Creating Overlapping Exposure Across Enterprise Environments
Nagomi Security, the leader in proactive defense and exposure management, released The Illusion of Maturity: 2026 Enterprise Exposure Snapshot, revealing a disconnect between how secure organizations believe they are and where real exposure persists. Across the enterprises analyzed, incomplete multi-factor authentication (MFA), missing or misconfigured endpoint detection and response (EDR), and weakened endpoint policies appear in more than 75% of organizations, often affecting the same systems at the same time.
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The report also shows that exposure is not spread evenly across environments. In most organizations, risk concentrates in a small number of high-impact conditions that persist over time. A single misconfiguration or degraded control can affect thousands of assets, creating more exposure than dozens of individual vulnerabilities. These conditions often sit outside traditional vulnerability metrics, which helps explain why dashboards look healthier even as attack paths remain open.
“Exposure is being created faster than most organizations can realistically fix it,” said Emanuel Salmona, co-founder and CEO of Nagomi Security. “Teams see the issues, but remediation slows down as work moves across tools, owners, and priorities. That operational latency leaves risk sitting in the environment far longer than it should. Real resilience comes from tightening operations and collapsing the time between seeing exposure and actually eliminating it.”
Key findings from the report include:
- Vulnerability management outperforms every other control area, with 91% of assets passing vulnerability assessments, while identity and endpoint controls pass at roughly 50%, and security awareness and training falls below 30%.
- More than 60% of organizations fail advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) policy tests, even when agents are deployed across the environment.
- Risk is driven by a small number of high-impact exposure conditions, with most organizations showing 20–40 total exposure findings that collapse into roughly seven high-signal conditions after correlation.
- Single exposure conditions routinely impact thousands of assets, including scenarios where one exploited remote code execution vulnerability combined with weakened endpoint protections affects approximately 2,000 assets per organization on average.
- Misconfigurations scale faster than vulnerabilities, with some hygiene failures affecting tens of thousands of assets within a single organization.
- Only about 30% of assets demonstrate strong control coverage across identity, endpoint, and security awareness at the same time, leaving the majority exposed to convergent failure paths.
The findings highlight a structural challenge for security teams: progress is often measured at the control level, while real risk accumulates where controls fail together. The report calls for a shift away from siloed metrics toward identifying and eliminating the high-impact exposure conditions attackers consistently exploit.
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