Reach Security Recognized as a Representative Provider of ASCA in the Gartner® Innovation Insight: Automated Security Control Assessment

In its January 2026 research report, Innovation Insight: Automated Security Control Assessment, Gartner discusses why misconfigured security controls remain one of the most persistent drivers of breaches and why automation is now required to address the problem at scale.

The Problem Gartner Identifies

Gartner finds that most organizations struggle with:

• Misaligned control coverage, weak defaults, detection logic gaps, and configuration drift
• Increasing operational complexity caused by large, multivendor security stacks
• Overreliance on multivendor cybersecurity portfolios, point-product dashboards, and custom-built automation
• Limited guidance from traditional exposure and vulnerability tools on how to optimize controls

At the same time, attackers are using AI to increase the speed and scale of attacks, putting even more pressure on defenders to reduce exposure created by control gaps and misconfigurations.

What Is ASCA?

Gartner defines Automated Security Control Assessment (ASCA) as a technology that:

• Continuously analyzes and optimizes deployed security controls
• Identifies configuration drift, policy deficiencies, weak defaults, and detection gaps
• Prioritizes findings using control context and threat relevance
• Recommends and assists with remediation actions
• Operates as agentless, cloud-based software using API integrations

ASCA automates the process of mapping attacker techniques to an organization’s actual defensive capabilities and industry best practices, enabling more efficient remediation and reducing manual effort and human error.

Core ASCA Capabilities

Gartner discusses three primary ASCA functions:

1.  Discovery: Centralized visibility into control coverage and misconfigurations using API-driven data collection.
2.  Prioritization: Risk ranking that incorporates control context, asset reachability, and attack feasibility, rather than relying only on generic severity scores.
3.  Mobilization: Support for manual, semi-automated, and automated remediation through configuration changes, compensating controls, and detection rule tuning.

Gartner also notes that while automation is essential, organizations should be cautious with full auto-remediation for business-critical systems. Many remediation actions will continue to require human oversight to avoid operational disruption.

Why ASCA Matters

According to Gartner, organizations adopting ASCA can:

• Reduce business risk and financial loss by continuously optimizing controls
• Improve staff efficiency and reduce human error
• Decrease dependency on IT operations teams through compensating controls
• Benchmark preparedness for threats such as ransomware and phishing
• Map control coverage to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and NIST

Gartner predicts that by 2030, organizations that successfully operationalize ASCA technologies will experience a 25% reduction in cybersecurity incidents.

Adoption and Market Outlook

Gartner estimates that fewer than 10% of organizations have adopted ASCA to automate control assessment and optimization across multiple cybersecurity product categories and providers, with most still relying on manual processes. However, by 2029, 70% of exposure management platforms providers will contain ASCA features or integrate with ASCA providers, up from 20% today.

Reach Security is Recognized as a Representative Provider of ASCA

In the report, Gartner recognizes Reach Security as a Representative Provider in the ASCA market. In our opinion, Reach delivers Automated Security Control Assessment by continuously analyzing tool configurations across identity, endpoint security, email security, firewall, SASE and other security and IT tools. Using read-only API-based integrations and cybersecurity domain-specific AI models, Reach:

• Identifies security blind spots in the form of misconfigurations and unused defensive capabilities
• Prioritizes action based on the severity of exposure, reachability, attack behaviors, and configuration context, and aligns control recommendations to your organization’s priorities
• Guides remediation every step of the way. Reach generates detailed step-by-step remediation guides, automatically pushes recommended configuration changes into a staged environment for verification, and then executes tailored remediation workflows across your security ecosystem via integrations with your ticketing systems – aligned to MITRE, ZTNA, or your chosen framework.
• Continuously validates that security controls are working as intended. Reach monitors your configurations over time to detect configuration drift the moment it happens, correct it, and continuously validates that security posture remains strong, and defenses stay aligned with your evolving environment and threat landscape. Security teams can achieve continuous visibility and control to stay ahead of change and ensure posture isn’t just assessed – it’s maintained.

Get the report.
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Gartner, Inc. Innovation Insight: Automated Security Control Assessment. Evgeny Mirolyubov. 10 January 2026.

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