Given escalating security threats, tightening regulatory expectations, and the strategic dependency on digital ecosystems, effective app management has become a critical boardroom and regulator agenda item.
Functional Application Ownership: The Next Governance Gap
Can your organisation name every application owner today?
Can you prove when each app was last tested, patched, or reviewed?
And are you certain you can manage Application Ownership when people leave?
For most enterprises, the honest answer is no — and that’s a growing governance gap.
From IT Risk to Enterprise Accountability
Cyber and compliance risk no longer sit neatly within IT. As digital transformation accelerated, business units began owning and requesting applications directly. What began as agility has quietly created exposure: functional ownership without governance.
IBM estimates that as much as 48% of enterprise applications are unmanaged or untracked[1], while Ponemon Institute states 60% of breaches stem from known but unpatched vulnerabilities[2].
These aren’t malicious failures — they’re visibility failures.
Applications approved for convenience are now critical systems with invisible owners.
Regulators have caught on. The SEC Cyber Accountability Rules, EU NIS2, and the UK’s DSIT Cyber Governance Code[3] require boards to evidence control of digital assets.
Auditors, insurers, and regulators now share one question:
“Who owns this application — and where’s the proof?”
Why Acting Now Matters
The cost of inaction is escalating. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach[4] report puts the global average breach cost at $4.4 million, and now some insurers are requesting proof of cybersecurity maturity, from zero-trust adoption to incident response readiness, before offering competitive coverage. Organisations without these controls could face premiums that can be 2–3x higher, or worse, outright denial of coverage.[5]
Every unpatched or unowned app now represents a line-item liability, an unmanaged exposure that can trigger fines, audit findings, or brand damage.
Manual audits and spreadsheets can’t keep up with this pace.
Ownership changes daily, cloud estates evolve hourly, and human churn leaves records outdated within weeks.
What used to be BAU IT hygiene has become a board-level governance risk.
Visibility isn’t optional anymore; it’s the foundation of accountability.
Why Governance Must Change
Traditional audit methods are reactive, built for annual reviews rather than continuous oversight.
Legal, compliance, and security teams need real-time assurance, not retrospective certification.
Governance must evolve from paperwork to data-driven proof, evidence that updates automatically, showing ownership, readiness, and compliance status across every application.
Without automation, even the best security team can’t manually validate thousands of app owners, patch cycles, and leaver transitions. IT teams will need a cast of thousands to keep applications patched and managed without automation if ownership purely remained in IT
The solution lies in automation. It's not about more policy — it’s about more precision.
Juriba: From Assumption to Assurance
Juriba Windows Application Management solutions was built to solve this.
Juriba’s App Owner and App Readiness, powered by Juriba AI, transforms functional application ownership from a blind spot into a controlled, auditable process.
- Total Visibility: Achieve 100 % application coverage — managed and unmanaged — in one unified platform.
- Smart Automation: Improves visibility and reduces risk associated with unmanaged applications by identifying those lacking ownership, assigning clear responsibility, and receiving alerts when owners fail to respond or leave.
- Proof of Compliance: Generate real-time, auditable evidence for regulators, auditors, and insurers at the click of a button.
- Efficiency at Scale: Automate up to 80 % of update tasks, cut testing costs by 40 %, and free teams to focus on higher-value risk management.
- Accelerate IT responsiveness and employee satisfaction with rapid application packaging and testing completed in just 7–15 minutes, available 24/7/365.
- Scales packaging, testing, and publishing across thousands of applications with consistency and compliance.
- Utilises AI intelligence to remove human error from command-line selection and automate complex steps
This is governance through automation, a continuous loop of visibility, validation, and assurance.
Quantify the governance risk hiding in your application estate
Unowned. Unpatched. Unaccounted for.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re now one of the biggest blind spots in enterprise security and compliance.
Our executive whitepaper, Windows Application Management: The Unquantified Risk in Your Organization, reveals:
• Why functional application ownership has become a major governance gap
• How unmanaged applications quietly drive breach, audit, and insurance exposure
• The limits of manual audits in a continuously changing estate
• How automation delivers real-time visibility, accountability, and proof of control
Get a clear, CISO-level view of the risks sitting across your application landscape and the practical framework to turn assumptions into assurance.
Download the whitepaper today
and start building continuous, auditable control across every Windows application.
Closing the Gap
Will your next major compliance issue come from an application no one owns, an outdated approval chain, or an expired owner record buried in a spreadsheet?
Functional application ownership is the next governance frontier, and enterprises that address it now will not only reduce risk but also strengthen trust and resilience across the organisation.
Because governance without visibility isn’t governance — it’s guesswork.
👉 Discover how Juriba helps enterprises protect their people, their compliance, and their brand
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