Cybersecurity Awareness Month: 4 reasons CISOs make exposure management a cornerstone of their cybersecurity strategy
Byline: Maranda Cigna, Vice President of Platform Marketing, Tenable
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CAM). GuidePoint Security is proud to join the national effort, championed by the US National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) in collaboration with the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), to amplify essential cybersecurity practices under the 2025 themes: Stay Safe Online and Building a Cyber Strong America.
For more than a decade, the notion that every organization will experience a cyber-attack has propelled massive investment in reactive security tools designed for threat detection and incident response. The thinking has been, “We can’t prevent all breaches, so let’s make sure we can detect them early in the attack cycle to mitigate impact.”
The emphasis on reactive security is starting to shift, thanks to a promising approach known as exposure management.
What is exposure management?
Exposure management is a strategic approach to proactive security designed to reduce risk by continuously identifying, contextualizing, prioritizing, and closing an organization’s most urgent cyber exposures across the entirety of the attack surface: IT, cloud, AI, identities, and OT/IoT.
Cyber exposures are toxic combinations of preventable cyber risks that form attack paths leading to an organization’s most critical assets. Preventable cyber risks include vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions.
Exposure management helps CISOs pinpoint where their organization’s most pressing exposures lie and articulate their potential business impact. And it enables security teams to proactively see how threat actors can gain initial access, move laterally, and elevate their privileges to steal data or disrupt operations by identifying assets and exposures across the attack surface; analyzing the relationships among assets, identities and risks; and mapping exposures into attack paths.
According to a study of 400 IT and cybersecurity professionals conducted earlier this year by Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, in partnership with Tenable, 86% of organizations have increased their budgets for exposure management. Here are four reasons why.
4 major benefits of exposure management
Exposure management improves efficiency by breaking down security silos
Many security programs struggle with siloed teams and tools. Vulnerability management, cloud security, identity security, application security, OT security, and other domains often operate independently. Each team only sees its own domain. The result? Their siloed tools create a flood of data lacking any context, which makes it difficult for security teams to correlate and act on.
Exposure management breaks down security silos. It provides a single, unified process for identifying, prioritizing, and remediating the most critical exposures, regardless of where they originate. And it gets security teams working together to make them more efficient and effective. Instead of chasing thousands of seemingly critical vulnerabilities, they can focus on closing “choke points” — the exposures that provide multiple attack paths to an organization’s most critical assets.
Exposure management helps shrink the attack surface and alleviate security burnout
When an organization proactively closes attack paths, it not only shrinks its exploitable attack surface it also diminishes the odds of a breach. This reduces burdens on reactive and proactive security teams alike, allowing them to shift from constant, stressful firefighting to more strategic, high-value work.
Exposure management facilitates board-level discussion of cyber risk
Many CISOs say they spend hours each quarter manually aggregating and analyzing data from siloed security tools to try to build a picture of their organization’s cyber risk profile for their board of directors.
Because each tool has its own way of assessing and scoring risk, CISOs often lack a unified view of risk and exposure. Consequently, they end up having to make highly subjective calls about the effectiveness of their controls and which security areas are trending red, yellow or green.
Exposure management eases the burdens of quarterly, board-level cyber risk reporting by facilitating the following:
- Cross-domain visibility across the attack surface
- Data consolidation, deduplication, and normalization across disparate sources
- Consistent risk scoring
- Prioritization based on threat intelligence, business context, exploitability, and impact
- Attack path analysis
Exposure management helps improve business and security outcomes
Ultimately, the goal of the security function is to protect the business. By providing expanded attack surface visibility, a unified view of security data, and enriched context about the relationships among assets, identities, and their impact if compromised, exposure management programs drive greater security productivity and efficiency while lowering overall cost and exposure.
An antidote for cybersecurity complexity
Nearly three out of four security and IT professionals (71%) surveyed for the Enterprise Strategy Group study say managing cyber risk isn’t getting any easier, due in large part to attack surface complexity and inefficiencies associated with siloed tools and security operations. This is precisely the problem exposure management is intended to solve.
More than a mere buzzword, exposure management is a necessary evolution of how organizations approach cybersecurity. To learn more about Exposure Management, visit Tenable’s Exposure Management Resource Center. Ensuring your organization is prepared is where a trusted advisor like GuidePoint Security comes in.
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