Nov 07, 2024

What is Exposure Management

by Brinqa Security Team

In the face of an ever-expanding attack surface and escalating vulnerability backlogs, enterprises are looking for new ways to retire “threat debt” to reduce business risk. Managing business risk today is about deeply understanding the correlation of your IT assets and business systems and priorities. It’s about aligning and integrating data from all of your security tools into a unified view, enriching the data with both business and threat landscape context, and prioritizing the real threats to your business.

This is where Exposure Management comes into play with a proactive and comprehensive approach to vulnerability and exposure remediation. It gives businesses complete visibility into their vulnerabilities throughout their company, as well as the context to cut through the noise and chaos, and reduce the risks that matter before attackers can exploit them. Exposure Management goes beyond old school vulnerability management. It consolidates all vulnerabilities, exposures, and misconfigurations across your entire digital ecosystem—including IT systems, applications, and cloud infrastructures—giving your organization a real-time understanding of where its greatest risks lie. By continuously assessing and addressing these cyber risks, Exposure Management ensures that your organization’s security posture remains strong, even as new threats emerge.

Best practices for exposure management across the enterprise

arly adopters of the approach have honed best practices for building out an Exposure Management practice and are sharing the hard won lessons from their pioneering initiatives. One of the key best practices is establishing continuous visibility across your organization’s entire attack surface, including IT infrastructure, applications, and cloud environments. This visibility ensures that no vulnerabilities go unnoticed, allowing your security team to identify exposures in real-time. Continuous monitoring, rather than periodic scans, ensures that newly emerging vulnerabilities are detected immediately, enabling swift action to mitigate risks before they can be exploited by attackers.

Organizations need complete visibility into their attack surface to effectively protect it. Exposure Management consolidates and prioritizes all risks across different environments, enabling businesses to focus on the issues that matter most. For more details, download the 2025 Guide to Risk Operations with Unified Exposure Management.

The benefits of exposure management

Because this modern approach to vulnerability management is more efficient and strategic, enterprises have finally realized the dream of eliminating vulnerability overload, backlog and burnout. Gartner highlights additional advantages of adopting exposure management over traditional vulnerability management:

Comprehensive Exposure and Risk Assessment: Exposure management offers a holistic view of an organization’s attack surface, encompassing not only traditional devices and applications but also external assets like corporate social media accounts and integrated supply chain systems. This broader perspective enables security teams to identify and prioritize risks more effectively, according to Gartner.
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM): Unlike traditional vulnerability management, which may be periodic, exposure management emphasizes continuous assessment and prioritization of threats. This iterative approach ensures that security postures are consistently refined to address evolving threats.
Enhanced Prioritization with Essential Context: By focusing on the most likely and impactful threats in light of your business and the threat landscape, exposure management allows organizations to allocate resources more efficiently, addressing vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to business operations.
Integration with Business Objectives: Exposure management aligns security efforts with business goals, ensuring that risk mitigation strategies support organizational objectives and resilience.
Improved Incident Response: Through continuous monitoring and validation of security controls, exposure management enhances an organization’s ability to detect, analyze, and respond to threats promptly, reducing potential damage from cyberattacks.

Key components of exposure management

According to industry analysts, an Exposure Management practice should cover the following essential components:

Comprehensive visibility of assets: One of the foundational components of exposure management is gaining full visibility into your assets—both physical and digital. This includes IT infrastructure, cloud environments, applications, third-party integrations, and unmanaged or shadow IT systems. You cannot secure what you do not know exists, so having a complete and up-to-date inventory of all assets is essential. This visibility allows organizations to understand their entire attack surface and where vulnerabilities might lie.
Continuous vulnerability discovery: Vulnerabilities are constantly emerging as systems evolve, new software is deployed, and threat actors develop more advanced techniques. Continuous vulnerability discovery ensures that organizations are always identifying new weaknesses and exposures in their systems. This is achieved through regular scans, vulnerability assessments, and attack surface management, which allows organizations to keep pace with the dynamic nature of cyber threats.
Risk-based prioritization: Not all vulnerabilities pose the same level of risk. Risk-based prioritization is critical to ensure that your security efforts are focused on the vulnerabilities that matter most to your organization. Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on factors such as exploitability, business impact, and the criticality of the affected assets allows organizations to allocate their resources effectively and fix the most significant risks first.
Business contextualization: Understanding the business context of vulnerabilities is a crucial component of exposure management. Organizations must consider how vulnerabilities and exposures impact critical business operations, such as revenue-generating systems or mission-critical applications. By contextualizing vulnerabilities within the scope of business operations, organizations can make more informed decisions about which risks to mitigate first and how to allocate resources.
Automated remediation and workflow integration: Exposure management is not just about identifying vulnerabilities; it’s also about remediating them quickly and efficiently. Automated workflows that integrate with IT systems and security tools (like ticketing systems, patch management, and configuration management) help streamline the remediation process. This automation ensures that critical vulnerabilities are addressed promptly and minimizes the manual effort involved, freeing up security teams to focus on higher-priority tasks.
Continuous monitoring and improvement: Unlike traditional vulnerability management, which often relies on point-in-time scans, exposure management requires continuous monitoring and cyber risk assessment. This real-time surveillance ensures that new exposures or changes in the environment are detected immediately. Continuous monitoring also helps to reassess the risk as new vulnerabilities are discovered or the threat landscape changes, ensuring that your organization remains secure over time.
Threat intelligence integration: Integrating threat intelligence into exposure management provides organizations with up-to-date information on emerging threats and attacker techniques. This intelligence helps security teams anticipate how vulnerabilities might be exploited and adjust their defensive strategies accordingly. By incorporating real-time threat intelligence, exposure management becomes more dynamic and aligned with the current threat landscape.
Attack path analysis: Vulnerabilities often don’t exist in isolation—attackers may chain together multiple exposures to penetrate deeper into your environment. Attack path analysis helps organizations understand how different vulnerabilities and misconfigurations could be exploited together. This allows for better cyber risk assessment and the identification of critical remediation actions that could break potential attack chains.
Cross-platform integration: An effective exposure management system integrates with other key tools in the cybersecurity ecosystem, such as SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response), threat intelligence platforms, and asset management systems. This cross-platform integration helps to create a unified approach to managing risks, ensuring that data from multiple sources can be aggregated and acted upon seamlessly.
Incident response and forensics: When exposures are identified, it’s important to have a clear plan for how to respond. Effective exposure management includes incident response capabilities that ensure organizations can quickly contain and mitigate threats. Additionally, forensic capabilities help teams investigate how vulnerabilities were exploited and take steps to prevent future incidents.
Metrics and reporting: Being able to measure the effectiveness of exposure management efforts is critical for demonstrating progress and ensuring accountability. Organizations need metrics and reporting capabilities that provide visibility into the current state of vulnerabilities, remediation progress, and risk reduction. Clear, actionable reports enable security teams to communicate their efforts to executive leadership and demonstrate the value of their security programs.
Compliance and regulatory alignment: Many industries are subject to strict regulations that require regular reporting on cybersecurity efforts and vulnerability management. Exposure management tools must support compliance with industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others. This includes generating audit-ready reports and ensuring that organizations are meeting the required security standards for protecting sensitive data.

Leveraging technology for Unified Exposure Management

While vulnerability scanners, threat intelligence data, ticketing systems are all important for your Exposure management tech stack, Brinqa is an essential platform to bring it all together in a cohesive practice and unlock insights in a single platform. Brinqa is a leader in Unified Exposure Management, offering a platform that integrates vulnerabilities, exposures, and misconfigurations from across your IT, applications, and cloud environments into a single, consolidated view. With Brinqa, you get more than just a tool for tracking vulnerabilities—you gain an intelligent system that correlates risk across your organization’s entire ecosystem and prioritizes remediation efforts based on real business impact. See a demo now.

Five reasons Brinqa should be your go-to for Unified Exposure Management:

Comprehensive Risk Aggregation: Brinqa aggregates exposures from multiple sources, including IT infrastructure, cloud services, and applications, into one platform. This unified view eliminates the silos that often prevent organizations from getting a complete picture of their security risks.
Contextualized Risk Prioritization: The Brinqa platform doesn’t just collect and report on vulnerabilities. It enriches this data with business context, allowing security teams to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their actual risk to the business. This ensures that your teams focus on the exposures that could have the greatest impact.
Automation of Remediation: With Brinqa, remediation isn’t just about creating alerts. The platform automates many of the manual tasks associated with vulnerability management, such as ticketing and assigning tasks to the appropriate teams. This reduces the burden on your IT and security teams and ensures that critical vulnerabilities are addressed swiftly.
Integration Across Tools: Brinqa seamlessly integrates with a variety of existing security tools and systems, from vulnerability scanners to IT ticketing systems. This makes it easier to consolidate data from multiple sources, allowing for a more streamlined and efficient risk management process.
Scalability and Flexibility: As your business grows, so does your attack surface. Brinqa’s platform is designed to scale with your organization, ensuring that you can continue to manage and mitigate risk, no matter how large your environment becomes.

Discover how Brinqa is modernizing outdated vulnerability management practices to enable unified exposure management for the world’s largest enterprises. This is enabling a 201% return on investment (ROI), same day patching, and a 20-40% reduction in business interruptions. See a demo.

Why exposure management matters more than ever

Today’s digital landscape is more complex than ever before. With remote workforces, cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations becoming the norm, the number of potential attack vectors is increasing exponentially. Relying solely on traditional security measures or vulnerability management tools leaves organizations exposed to emerging threats.

The key challenges that Exposure Management addresses include:

Unseen Vulnerabilities: New vulnerabilities are being discovered at an increasing rate. Exposure Management ensures continuous identification of these risks, giving organizations the ability to address them before they are weaponized by attackers.
Complex IT Environments: With the shift to cloud and hybrid IT environments, many organizations struggle to gain full visibility into their attack surface. Exposure Management consolidates data from all environments into a single view, making it easier to understand where risks lie.
Time and Resource Constraints: Security teams are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of vulnerabilities they need to address. Exposure Management helps prioritize these vulnerabilities based on their actual risk, ensuring that teams focus on the issues that matter most.

Conclusion: A Proactive Approach

Brinqa’s Unified Exposure Management platform is more than just a vulnerability management tool. It offers a proactive, risk-based approach that helps organizations continuously identify, prioritize, and address exposures across their entire digital landscape.

With Brinqa, your security team can move from being reactive to being strategically proactive—understanding not just where vulnerabilities exist, but how those vulnerabilities could impact critical business operations and how best to remediate them. This enables organizations to maintain a stronger security posture while also freeing up valuable time and resources.

In a world where new threats are constantly emerging, it’s no longer enough to just identify and fix vulnerabilities in a silo. Organizations need to understand their full risk landscape, prioritize their response, and take swift action. Brinqa’s Unified Exposure Management platform is designed to do exactly that—helping businesses stay ahead of threats and protect what matters most.

Learn how Brinqa can help you unify your vulnerability management programs, enrich vulnerability data with business and threat landscape context and automate remediation for continuous threat exposure management.