In today’s hyper-connected environments, security teams face an uncomfortable truth: most organisations simply don’t know how many devices are actually on their network. Asset discovery has become a foundational challenge, as organizations struggle to identify, catalog, and monitor all assets across diverse environments. With IoT, OT and edge devices multiplying at unprecedented speed, the traditional assumption that IT has an accurate inventory is no longer realistic. What makes this more urgent is that attackers increasingly target exactly those devices organisations aren’t aware of.

Device Authority’s July newsletter emphasised this point starkly: one-third of all data breaches now involve an IoT device, and more than 50% of connected devices contain critical vulnerabilities that attackers can easily exploit. The growing number of cyber threats targeting IoT and OT devices in critical sectors makes this risk even more severe. Their update highlighted the role of the Discovery Tool, which can identify connected devices, surface risks and automatically onboard them into KeyScaler 2025’s Zero Trust workflows.

This shift reveals a deeper reality: before you can secure your devices, you must first find them — and in 2025, agentless discovery is the only approach that scales across the diversity of IoT and OT. Limited visibility into unmanaged or hidden devices remains a core issue, leaving organizations exposed and hampering Zero Trust initiatives.

This article explores why IoT/OT discovery is so difficult, why agentless methods have become essential, and how Device Authority’s Discovery Tool closes the visibility gap that has plagued enterprises for years. Achieving complete visibility is now a prerequisite for effective device management, security, and regulatory compliance.

The Visibility Crisis: Why Organisations Are Operating Blind

Most enterprises overestimate how well they understand their device estate. Traditional IT asset management works for laptops or servers, but IoT/OT ecosystems introduce complications that make conventional approaches ineffective.

IoT and OT devices often:

• Arrive on networks without formal onboarding
• Lack agents, APIs or management interfaces
• Use proprietary or vendor-locked firmware
• Are installed by contractors, integrators or facility teams
• Inherit long operational lifespans without planned refresh cycles
• Have limited computing resources (making agents impossible)

As a result, organisations develop blind spots — not through negligence, but because the infrastructure itself is too diverse and fast-moving.

The consequences are serious. Unknown devices mean unknown vulnerabilities, unknown communication flows and unknown exposure. Without accurate asset information, organizations cannot maintain a comprehensive device inventory, making it difficult to discover, verify, and manage devices across environments. Every unmanaged device becomes a potential access point, a lateral movement pivot or a botnet target.

Why Traditional Discovery Approaches Don’t Work for IoT/OT

Many IT teams attempt to adapt existing tools — such as EDR, vulnerability scanners, NAC, or those designed for network devices — to discover IoT/OT devices. But these tools assume devices can run software agents or expose detailed system information, which is rarely the case.

IoT/OT devices commonly:

• Cannot support EDR agents
• Do not respond properly to traditional scans
• Use obscure or proprietary protocols
• Offer incomplete or misleading metadata
• Resist interrogation due to fragility or uptime requirements
• Lack standardised OS-level identifiers

In OT environments, where operational technology such as industrial control systems and PLCs are present, aggressive scanning can even cause operational disruption by overloading sensitive PLCs or triggering system faults.

This is why agentless discovery, designed specifically for IoT and OT, is now the industry standard — and increasingly a compliance requirement in frameworks such as NIST, CRA and EO 14028.

A modern discovery engine enables comprehensive asset discovery across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, unifying the detection and management of IoT, OT, and network devices.

Agentless Discovery: The Modern Solution to a Growing Problem

Agentless discovery works by analysing the behaviour of devices on the network, rather than relying on installed software or accessible interfaces. This approach is essential for gaining visibility across diverse environments, including industrial environments and complex IoT networks.

Device Authority’s Discovery Tool takes this concept further by using advanced fingerprinting, protocol analysis and behavioural classification to identify:

• Device type, device models, and manufacturer
• Firmware versions
• Communication patterns
• Associated vulnerabilities
• Compliance posture
• Risk indicators tied to identity and behaviour

The tool also supports real time asset discovery, enabling continuous monitoring and immediate vulnerability management across the entire iot network. Machine learning is leveraged for advanced behavioral analysis and threat detection, improving the accuracy of identifying cyberattacks.

The result is a non-intrusive, highly accurate picture of the device estate, suitable for both IT and OT networks.

This is particularly important for environments where uptime is critical, such as healthcare and industrial operations, where scanning must be passive and non-disruptive.

Network Discovery and Mapping: Laying the Foundation for Visibility

Before organisations can secure their IoT, OT, and IT environments, they must first understand what is actually connected to their networks. Network discovery and mapping are the essential first steps in building a complete asset inventory—without them, any attempt at security, compliance, or risk management is fundamentally compromised.

Modern enterprise networks are a complex web of devices: from traditional IT assets like servers and laptops, to a rapidly growing array of IoT devices, OT systems, mobile devices, medical equipment, industrial control systems, and more. Many of these devices operate with different operating systems, communication protocols, and security postures. Some are managed and regularly updated, while others—such as legacy OT devices or third-party IoT assets—may be completely unmanaged and invisible to traditional network monitoring tools.

Agentless network discovery addresses this challenge by automatically detecting every device communicating on the network, regardless of device type, manufacturer, or operating system. By passively analysing network traffic and communication patterns, advanced discovery engines can identify not just the presence of devices, but also their relationships, typical behaviours, and potential vulnerabilities. This approach enables organisations to uncover unknown devices, shadow IT, and rogue assets that would otherwise expand the attack surface and put sensitive data or critical infrastructure at risk.

Comprehensive network mapping provides real-time asset data, revealing how devices interact, which services they access, and where potential risks may lie. This level of asset visibility is crucial for effective vulnerability management, incident response, and continuous monitoring. It also supports operational efficiency by helping IT and security teams prioritise resources, streamline device configuration, and ensure that all discovered devices are accounted for in security policies.

Ultimately, network discovery and mapping lay the groundwork for every other security initiative. With a complete, up-to-date view of all connected devices and their communication flows, organisations can move confidently toward Zero Trust, protect critical infrastructure, and maintain compliance—even as their IoT and OT environments continue to grow and evolve.

The Discovery Tool: What It Actually Does

The Discovery Tool is engineered to bridge the gap between visibility and control. Device Authority describes the tool as the entry point to the KeyScaler 2025 Zero Trust workflow: it performs comprehensive asset discovery to identify and catalog all devices across diverse environments, enabling organizations to manage discovered devices efficiently. The tool finds devices, surfaces risks, and enables seamless onboarding into identity-driven security controls.

Here’s how it works in practice:

It identifies every connected device

The tool performs agentless scans that detect IoT, OT, IIoT, medical devices, building controls, device models, network devices, and other embedded systems, even if they use minimal or vendor-specific protocols.

As your network grows, the tool enables discovery and tracking of more devices, ensuring comprehensive visibility and security across your environment.

It reveals vulnerabilities and misconfigurations

Once a device is discovered, the tool analyses firmware, communication behaviour, authentication methods and known CVEs to highlight security issues that would otherwise go undetected. By leveraging threat intelligence, the tool provides additional context and prioritization for identified vulnerabilities, helping organizations assess exploit likelihood and understand the potential impact on their assets.

It assesses risk through behavioural insights

The tool examines how devices behave on the network, identifying suspicious connections, unexpected communication partners or anomalous behaviour patterns linked to compromised or spoofed devices. By providing these risk insights, organizations can optimize the allocation and utilization of security resources, ensuring that efforts are focused where they are needed most.

It simplifies Zero Trust onboarding

Discovery is only the first step. The tool can feed devices directly into KeyScaler 2025, which assigns cryptographic identity, enforces policy and automates lifecycle management—including onboarding for devices in cloud environments.

What makes the Discovery Tool powerful is that it not only maps a device’s presence but connects that device to a trust framework that can enforce, not just observe.

The Discovery → Identity → Policy Model

Discovery alone is not enough. Asset discovery is the crucial first step—identifying and cataloging all devices across your environment. Many tools can enumerate devices, but few connect that visibility to actionable controls. Device Authority closes this gap through a three-stage model to help organizations manage devices and policies effectively:

1. Discovery

Find everything — including unmanaged, shadow and legacy devices — without disrupting operations, leveraging real time asset discovery for continuous monitoring.

2. Identity

Assign a verifiable machine identity (certificate, key or trust anchor) to each device, allowing it to be authenticated reliably.

3. Policy Enforcement

Use KeyScaler 2025 to apply Zero Trust policies, rotate credentials, enforce encryption and monitor device behaviour continuously.

This pipeline creates an end-to-end trust architecture that meets modern regulatory expectations and enables continuous risk management.

Closing the Unmanaged Device Gap

Unmanaged devices pose the largest risk to IoT/OT environments. While traditional IT devices have established security protocols, IoT security presents unique challenges due to the diversity, scale, and lack of standardization in IoT devices. Attackers exploit unmanaged devices because they are:

• Hard to detect
• Rarely patched
• Poorly authenticated
• Often forgotten by IT teams

The Discovery Tool is specifically designed to uncover these hidden devices. Because it operates agentlessly, it can identify telematics units, wireless sensors, BMS controllers, medical devices, industrial robots and other assets that cannot be monitored using traditional methods.

This is where the July newsletter statistics become critical: if unmanaged devices are involved in a third of all breaches, then finding and onboarding them is an urgent priority. The Discovery Tool provides the visibility required to do so.

Why Discovery Is Now Required for Compliance

New and emerging regulations, including NIST IoT standards, the EU Cyber Resilience Act and EO 14028, require organisations to maintain accurate inventories of connected assets and comprehensive asset information. Compliance frameworks now expect organisations to:

• Identify all devices within scope
• Detect vulnerabilities in real time
• Monitor changes continuously
• Prove device identity and trustworthiness
• Maintain audit logs over the full lifecycle

For operational technology environments, compliance requirements also include maintaining visibility and control over industrial systems and ensuring secure management of asset information.

The Discovery Tool gives organisations the baseline needed to achieve this — and the automated onboarding into KeyScaler ensures compliance remains continuous, not periodic.

Use Cases Across Industry

Healthcare

Discover legacy medical devices that cannot run agents but handle critical patient data or clinical workflows.

Manufacturing & OT

Map PLCs, HMIs, and other operational technology (OT) and factory automation components that often operate independently of IT control.

Smart Buildings

Identify building management systems, IoT sensors, access control units and cameras that frequently fall unnoticed into corporate networks.

Automotive & Mobility

Validate telematics units, charging infrastructure and connected vehicle components across dealer, fleet and production environments.

Energy & Utilities

Discover field-deployed IoT devices, smart meters, substation controllers and renewable energy assets.

Across all these environments, visibility is the prerequisite for Zero Trust.

Why Discovery + KeyScaler 2025 Is the Winning Combination

Discovery without trust is diagnostic.
Trust without discovery is incomplete.
Comprehensive asset discovery and achieving complete visibility are the foundation of this self-reinforcing security model:

• Discover unknown or unmanaged devices through automated asset discovery for complete visibility
• Verify them with cryptographic identity
• Enforce policy across the entire lifecycle
• Monitor continuously for anomalous behaviour
• Automate remediation, rotation and revocation

The Discovery Tool initiates the cycle — KeyScaler 2025 sustains it.

Conclusion: Discovery Is No Longer Optional – It’s the Foundation of Zero Trust

In 2025, IoT and OT environments are too large, too complex and too dynamic to secure without foundational visibility. Agentless discovery has become essential not just for security, but for compliance, risk management and operational integrity.

Device Authority’s Discovery Tool gives organisations a way to resolve this visibility crisis with a solution built specifically for IoT and OT realities — and when combined with KeyScaler 2025, it transforms discovery into enforceable, automated Zero Trust.

Every journey to securing IoT/OT environments begins with a single action: find every device. Everything else flows from that.