Brinqa Expert Q&A: Inside Enterprise Exposure Management at Scale with James Walta
by James Walta, VP of Product//10 min read/
Enterprise security work rarely gets simpler; it gets louder.
Every year brings new assets, new findings, new expectations, and new ways risk can surface across the environment. What doesn’t change nearly as fast is the size of the team responsible for making sense of it all, or the pressure to show that the work is actually reducing risk.
To better understand what enterprise teams are really facing (and what actually helps), we sat down with James Walta, VP of Product at Brinqa and former VP of Customer Success. In this conversation, James shares what he’s seeing across Brinqa’s customer base, where organizations underestimate exposure management complexity, and how teams approach prioritization, scale, and trust in day-to-day operations.
This Q&A offers a grounded look at enterprise exposure management, vulnerability prioritization, and how continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) programs mature over time – without adding chaos.
The Most Common Challenge: Inconsistent Context Across Teams
Q: When you look across Brinqa’s customer base, what challenges show up most consistently as enterprises try to modernize exposure management?
James: The biggest challenge we see is consistency, specifically, how organizations structure and talk about their data.
Different teams often use different standards, different definitions of criticality, and different ownership models. Remediation might be highly structured in one department and completely ad hoc in another.
When teams aren’t speaking the same language, it becomes incredibly difficult to operationalize exposure management at scale. Operationalizing exposure management at scale depends on shared context: common asset ownership, aligned business criticality, and a consistent source of truth for risk.
This lack of consistency becomes more challenging as environments grow larger and more complex.
The Reality Ahead: More Data, the Same Teams
Q: As enterprise organizations plan for 2026, what’s top of mind for them?
James: Scale and complexity. Vulnerability volumes are growing fast, not just because of new assets, but because of new scanning technologies and new discovery methods.
The challenge is that security expectations keep rising, but budgets and headcount aren’t. Teams are dealing with exponentially more data using the same resources they had years ago. These pressures are shaping how organizations think about managing exposure overall. Our job is about easing that pressure and helping teams operate more efficiently.
The problem isn’t a lack of data, it’s how to prioritize risk and prove that remediation efforts are actually working.
“Teams are working with the same number of people, but dealing with exponentially more data than they had just a few years ago... Our job is about easing that pressure and helping teams operate more efficiently.”
Where Teams Underestimate the Complexity of Exposure Management
Q: Where do organizations tend to underestimate the complexity of exposure management?
James: Visibility is the easy milestone. Most teams can get to “we see what’s out there.” The real challenge comes after that, when you need to prioritize and act across multiple tools, teams, and workflows in a standardized and consistent model.
What often gets overlooked is how much usable context organizations already have. Even partially built internal sources of truth, asset inventories, business mappings, ownership data, can dramatically improve risk-based vulnerability management when they’re correlated and consistently applied.
The challenge isn’t adding more tools; it’s enforcing shared standards and creating a single, trusted way to talk about cyber risk and remediation.
Turning Insight Into Action
Q: What’s the biggest hurdle after visibility?
James: Structuring data so it drives action. That means turning exposure insights into remediation workflows, leadership reporting, and trend-based metrics that show progress over time. It can feel overwhelming, but most teams already have the building blocks.
The key is using existing data more intentionally, and letting prioritization models surface the few things that actually matter – and focusing effort on a single, consistent program model rather than managing multiple similar approaches across different scanning tools.
It comes down to prioritization decisions that help teams understand what to work on first. Not everything needs to be fixed. Teams need clarity on what matters most.
“The real challenge starts once teams move beyond visibility and have to prioritize and act across different tools and teams.”
What Brinqa Does Differently
Q: What does Brinqa do differently to help customers mature over time?
James: First, we focus on operationalizing exposure management, not just visualizing it. Brinqa helps align security, IT, remediation, and leadership teams around consistent prioritization and measurable outcomes. Everyone operates from the same playbook.
Second, the platform is designed to scale with organizational maturity. Customers can prove a model in one area, then replicate it across teams and departments as confidence grows. This allows teams to prove a model in one area and then expand it over time as confidence grows.
“Brinqa is designed to grow with the maturity of the organization. Customers can prove a model in one part of the organization and then expand it across teams as confidence grows.”
A Lesson from the Most Successful Deployments
Q: Have customers ever surprised you or changed your perspective?
James: Absolutely. Some of our most successful customers aren’t using every feature, they’re going deep on the ones that matter most.
Instead of measuring success by adoption breadth, we’ve seen far better outcomes when teams focus on outcome depth. They pick a small number of high-impact use cases, execute them well, and use those wins to prove ROI.
That depth makes it easier to communicate success to leadership and build momentum inside the organization.
AI in 2026: Both Sides of the Story
Q: How are customers thinking about AI in 2026?
James: Customers are paying attention to both sides of how AI is showing up.
On one side, AI continues to accelerate the number of vulnerabilities. It’s being used by bad actors and research teams to figure out where vulnerabilities exist within the different products that we’re using. That draws more attention to the holes already present in enterprise environments and increases the remediation actions teams need to take – and that data is becoming public.
On the other side, AI is also helping provide additional context. It is not stepping in to do the heavy lifting for security teams, but it is an accelerator – helping teams be more efficient in their day-to-day work. Used well, AI supports better understanding and context and helps teams make the right prioritization decisions.
In exposure management, that value shows up in the ability to combine environmental context with what is known on the threat intelligence side. Bringing those inputs together produces a more concise output, including what to target, why certain vulnerabilities should be patched before others, and how remediation teams can be directed toward the small percentage of vulnerabilities that matter most.
“AI is powerful because it helps combine context and deliver a more concise output – showing what to target, why certain vulnerabilities should be patched over others, and how to focus remediation teams on the small percentage that matters most.”
What It Really Means to “End the Fire Drill”
Q: From a customer success perspective, what does ending the fire drill actually look like?
James: It’s about trust: trusting the process, trusting the data, and trusting that prioritization will work even when something unexpected happens.
When a zero-day hits, teams shouldn’t scramble. The right context should push it to the top automatically, route it to the right remediation teams, and enforce the right SLAs. This is the point where teams can rely on the process instead of reacting in the moment. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s progress without panic.
Final Takeaway
Across enterprise environments, a few themes consistently shape effective exposure management programs: structure, shared context, prioritization, and trust in the process.
When teams apply consistent standards to their data, use the context they already have, and focus on a defined set of outcomes, exposure management becomes more predictable and more defensible. Prioritization is no longer reactive or manual, it is embedded into how work flows across security, IT, and remediation teams.
At scale, progress comes from depth, not breadth. Teams that focus on a small number of high-impact use cases, execute them well, and build confidence step by step are better positioned to handle growing exposure without constant disruption.
Do these themes resonate?
Connecting with a Brinqa expert can help you assess where your exposure management program stands today and identify practical next steps to bring more clarity, consistency, and momentum into your environment.
FAQs
Brinqa Expert Q&A is a recurring interview series featuring leaders across Brinqa who work closely with enterprise security teams. Each conversation reflects firsthand experience supporting complex environments and focuses on how organizations approach exposure management in practice.
