How a Leading Financial Institution Killed the Fire Drill and Found Clarity in the Chaos

Stories from the Field

Stories from the Field is a monthly series sharing real-world lessons from security leaders who’ve tackled challenges in vulnerability and risk exposure management – turning obstacles into opportunities for stronger, data-driven security programs.

When Every Alert Feels Urgent

In modern enterprise security operations, it’s easy to mistake activity for progress. Teams move fast – patching, reporting, and remediating around the clock – yet still feel like they’re falling behind.

That was the reality for one large financial services organization whose vulnerability management program had become a perpetual fire drill. Each week began with a flood of vulnerability scan results, dozens of duplicated tickets, and an inbox full of “urgent” alerts. Security and IT teams were overwhelmed, working harder than ever but never actually getting ahead.

Despite their investment in automation tools and dashboards, leadership still couldn’t answer a simple question: What’s our true level of exposure right now?

It wasn’t a lack of effort; it was a lack of clarity.

The Fire Drill Pattern

The organization’s security and IT teams had fallen into a reactive cycle familiar to many enterprise programs. Vulnerability scans triggered a wave of tickets, duplicate issues appeared across systems, and some were fixed twice while others weren’t fixed at all.

Each group prioritized differently. Security teams focused on severity scores, while IT operations balanced uptime and availability. Both were acting on incomplete information.

The result was a cycle of confusion, duplication, and rework – symptoms of a vulnerability management program that had become process-rich but insight-poor.

The team wasn’t short on data; it was drowning in it.

Transforming Noise Into Navigation: Rethinking Exposure Management

Security teams often ask how to move from reactive vulnerability management to proactive exposure management. The answer isn’t more automation, it's connecting and leveraging the data they already have.

For this financial organization, the turning point came when they reframed the problem. The goal wasn’t to add another layer of data; it was to connect the data already in play.

By adopting a data-driven exposure management approach, the team shifted focus from chasing alerts to understanding relationships between vulnerabilities, assets, and business impact. Through automated synchronization between vulnerability and IT service systems, the team eliminated redundant tickets and conflicting assignments. Each finding was linked to the right asset and routed to the right team with consistent context, so remediation could finally happen with accuracy and accountability.

Instead of managing findings in isolation, they managed exposure holistically. Remediation cycles shortened, exception handling became transparent, and leadership began reviewing risk through a single, unified lens.

Most importantly, teams finally trusted the data behind their decisions.

Killing the Fire Drill for Good

Over time, the organization’s culture evolved alongside its process. Security and IT began collaborating rather than trading blame. Weekly fire drills gave way to predictable, prioritized cycles driven by data instead of emotion.

Their exposure management program didn’t depend on perfect data – just connected data. By creating one source of truth across vulnerability and IT systems, they could finally see what mattered most.

The difference was immediate and measurable:

• Duplication dropped. Every issue had a single owner.
• Visibility improved. Teams knew what was remediated and why.
• Confidence increased. Leadership trusted their reporting and their decisions.

The fire drills didn’t disappear because the world became less chaotic, they disappeared because the team learned how to manage that chaos with context.

Lessons from the Field

This story captures what many enterprise security teams already know: you can’t eliminate the chaos of cybersecurity, but you can make sense of it.

Here’s what this team learned along the way:

• More dashboards don’t mean more clarity. Without unified data, new dashboards only visualize confusion.
• Automation needs context. Syncing systems without aligning ownership and priority just moves chaos faster.
• Perfection isn’t the goal, progress is. The best programs don’t chase perfect data; they build trustworthy data.

By focusing on connection over control, this organization turned vulnerability management into a context-driven exposure management practice – one built for the imperfect world every security leader operates in.

The Brinqa Perspective: Built for the Imperfect World

Brinqa helps organizations unify fragmented vulnerability, IT, and cloud data into a single, trustworthy source of truth. The platform was built for complexity, not simplicity, because enterprise security data will always be imperfect, and that’s exactly where clarity matters most.

If your teams are still running fire drills, it’s time to rethink the way you manage exposure. You don’t kill the fire drill by cleaning up your data; you kill it by connecting it.

To learn more, don’t miss our expert-led webinar, Mind the Gap – A Hero’s Guide to Exposure Management.

FAQs:

1. What causes constant “fire drills” in security operations?

Fire drills happen when security and IT teams respond reactively to vulnerability data from multiple tools that aren’t connected. Duplicate tickets, conflicting priorities, and incomplete visibility create confusion that leads to nonstop, high-stress remediation cycles.

2. How does exposure management reduce chaos in vulnerability management?

Exposure management connects data from vulnerability scanners, IT systems, and business context sources to show which risks actually matter. By creating one unified view of assets, vulnerabilities, and ownership, teams can prioritize efficiently and eliminate redundant work.

3. What’s the difference between vulnerability management and exposure management?

Vulnerability management focuses on identifying and patching known weaknesses, while exposure management takes a broader approach by unifying vulnerability, configuration, and business context data to assess and prioritize true risk. It helps organizations move from fixing everything to fixing what matters most.

4. How can data integration improve vulnerability remediation?

When vulnerability and IT service systems are synchronized, duplicate tickets are removed and ownership becomes clear. Each vulnerability exists once, assigned to the right team, in the right workflow, which shortens remediation cycles and improves accuracy.

5. Do organizations need perfect data to manage exposure effectively?

No. Exposure management isn’t about perfect data, it’s about connected data. Even imperfect data can reveal meaningful patterns when it’s unified across systems, allowing teams to make informed, confident risk decisions.

6. What measurable results can teams expect after adopting exposure management?

Organizations typically see a drop in duplicate findings, faster remediation cycles, clearer visibility into asset risk, and stronger confidence in executive-level reporting. Most importantly, fire drills decrease as teams move from reactive response to proactive risk management.

7. How can Brinqa help eliminate security fire drills?

Brinqa unifies fragmented vulnerability, IT, and cloud data into a single, trustworthy source of truth. The platform helps organizations connect their data, align teams, and manage exposure holistically, transforming constant firefighting into focused, data-driven action.