How a Fortune 500 Energy Company Cut Vulnerability Reporting From Two Weeks to Four Hours

How one global enterprise moved off spreadsheets and scaled exposure management with Brinqa

A Fortune 500 global energy technology company had a familiar problem. The vulnerability management team spent half of every month pulling data out of tools, cleaning it in spreadsheets and building reports by hand.

They needed more than prettier reports. They needed a way to:

• Get out of spreadsheet hell
• Give hundreds of vulnerability owners clear, targeted visibility
• Support the CISO and the board with credible metrics
• Do it all with a small team

This is how they used Brinqa to turn a manual reporting function into a strategic exposure management program.

Who is this case study about?

For confidentiality reasons, we refer to the customer as a Fortune 500 global energy technology company.

Key context:

• Global footprint with thousands of applications
• Cyber Fusion Center and enterprise vulnerability management function
• Five person core team responsible for exposure reporting and analytics
• Brinqa is the central exposure management platform

What did their security landscape look like before Brinqa?

Before Brinqa, there was no real data consolidation platform for vulnerabilities.

The team:

• Pulled reports directly from Qualys
• Exported huge CSV files and Excel sheets
• Manually applied business logic and ownership
• Had no integration with their service desk
• Lacked reliable mapping between vulnerabilities and business applications

Everything lived in spreadsheets that had tens or hundreds of thousands of rows.

Two major problems showed up quickly:

1. Time

• Monthly metrics and reporting required about two full weeks of effort
• The team had little time left for process improvement or strategic work

2. Visibility

• Only a small group saw the data
• Application owners and business units did not have self service access
• Security leadership had limited, high level views

The vulnerability management team was essentially a reporting factory.

What problem were they actually trying to solve?

On paper it was “automate reporting.” In reality it was three deeper needs.

1. Consolidate data across tools

They used multiple security tools, including:

• Qualys for scanning
• Product security tools
• Pen test tools

They needed one place to see an asset’s risk across multiple stages and tools, not a separate view for each product.

2. Protect the scanning environment

They did not want to give thousands of people direct access to Qualys or other core platforms. They needed a separate, safer layer where owners could see what mattered to them without touching source systems.

3. Free the team from manual work

Two weeks every month on metrics had a big opportunity cost. The Cyber Fusion Center wanted the team focused on:

• Exceptions and ownership
• External attack surface management
• Threat hunting and support
• Process design and prioritization

To do that, reporting had to become fast, consistent and automated.

Why did they choose Brinqa?

During their evaluation, several themes stood out for them.

1. Connectors and integrations Brinqa offered connectors for the tools they cared about, including their service desk. That meant less custom plumbing and faster time to value.

2. Custom logic without losing out of the box structure The team compared Brinqa to other options such as ServiceNow Vulnerability Response and modules from scanning vendors. They needed to:

• Build custom calculations when standard fields were not enough
• Define ownership and clustering rules that reflected how their business actually worked
• Work directly with user defined libraries, not wait on vendor feature requests

3. Brinqa gave them a balance. In their words, Brinqa's version 11 release became a strong blend of useful defaults plus deep customizability when needed.

4. Enterprise partnership and engineering support The team worked regularly with Brinqa engineers and professional services through implementation and version upgrades. Weekly touchpoints and direct access to experts mattered as much as the product itself.

How did Brinqa change reporting and analytics?

The biggest headline result is simple: Monthly vulnerability reporting shrank from about two weeks to about four hours.

That change came from several shifts.

Automated data consolidation

Brinqa pulls in data from Qualys and other tools, normalizes it and maintains relationships between findings, assets, ownership and business context. The team no longer exports, merges and cleans spreadsheets by hand.

Automated ownership and clustering

Before Brinqa, a separate ownership group reviewed vulnerabilities by hand and decided which remediation group should receive each one.

Using Brinqa clustering, they now:

• Define asset profiles, operating system families and other attributes
• Automate routing to more than 2,500 remediation owner groups
• Cover about 97 percent of ownership decisions through automation

That single change gave the ownership team their time back so they can focus on patching and configuration work, not sorting records.

Self service reporting across the organization

With Brinqa, they can create highly targeted reports for specific owners. An individual asset or application owner can log in and see data that is filtered to only what they are responsible for. This:

• Saves time for the central team
• Reduces the wall of irrelevant data for each owner
• Speeds up review and remediation decisions

The result is a standing library of reports and dashboards instead of one giant monthly extract.

Who uses the Brinqa platform inside this enterprise?

Brinqa is now used by roughly 1,500 people across the company, including:

• Vulnerability owners
• Application and network teams
• Cyber Fusion Center staff
• Cybersecurity risk and compliance groups
• The CISO and other senior leaders
• Board level reporting consumers

Different teams see different slices of the same data model. Executives get aggregated metrics. Owners get focused lists and trends.

The platform has essentially become the single place to go to understand vulnerability and exposure data.

How did this impact the team’s role and perception?

The vulnerability team used to be seen as a reporting function. Most of their time went into pulling numbers and delivering one main report.

With Brinqa, the same five person team now:

• Supports external attack surface management
• Helps with threat hunting
• Manages exceptions and ownership
• Designs and maintains processes for remediation
• Acts as a knowledge hub for vulnerability data across the enterprise

The team moved from “report slingers” to a central, visible part of the Cyber Fusion Center. They also gained credibility with leadership by responding quickly to new reporting requests and producing custom dashboards for different business segments.

What changed for leadership and the board?

Before Brinqa, visibility was limited and usually centered around a single high level report.

Today the company:

• Sends tailored reports to the board of directors
• Provides regular insight to the CISO and cybersecurity leadership
• Delivers segment specific reports for business units
• Shares dashboards with application and network teams

Leadership appreciates that:

• They have one place to see the status of vulnerabilities
• New metrics can often be created in house without long vendor cycles
• Additional data and context can be added to Brinqa without heavy overhead

In short, Brinqa helps them answer “where are we exposed” with more confidence and precision.

What can other enterprises learn from this story?

Here are a few practical takeaways for large organizations that still rely on spreadsheets or scanner native reporting.

1. You probably need a platform before you need more people This company runs a global program with a five person core team. One engineer owns the Brinqa platform. Without Brinqa, they estimate they would need three or four people just to run a comparable solution in other tools.
2. Automate ownership and routing early Automating ownership mapping for thousands of groups frees up time for higher value work. It also clarifies accountability, which supports better remediation outcomes.
3. Give owners focused views, not global spreadsheets Letting each owner see only what they are responsible for reduces noise and speeds reviews. A single shared platform can serve everyone, from patch teams to the board, if the data model is right.
4. Treat exposure management as a long term program, not just a reporting project The real value came when the team moved beyond monthly metrics and used Brinqa as the backbone for external attack surface, exceptions, threat hunting and broader cyber risk efforts.
5. Reevaluate Brinqa if you only saw earlier versions This customer was clear that version 11 is “a completely different tool” compared to older releases. The blend of out of the box features and configurable logic has been key for them.

Ready to move your team off spreadsheets?

If your vulnerability reporting still lives in giant Excel files and ad hoc scripts, you are not alone. The good news is that you do not have to scale your team fourfold to fix it.

Brinqa helps enterprises consolidate security data, automate ownership and reporting and give every stakeholder the view they need, from individual remediation groups to the board.

If you want to see how this could look in your environment, connect with our team and explore Brinqa for enterprise exposure management.