Each Monday, the Tenable Exposure Management Academy provides the practical, real-world guidance you need to shift from vulnerability management to exposure management. In this post, the second of two parts, we look closely at six ways exposure management can help you tame security tool sprawl. You can read part one here and the entire Exposure Management Academy series here.
If you’re managing cyber risk, you know there’s one fundamental question you have to answer: Where are we most exposed? On the surface, that might seem like a simple ask. Are you at risk or not? Like many things, in practice it’s a bit tougher to answer — even though you installed all those security tools to keep your organization safe. But those tools might be a big part of the problem. Most enterprises now struggle with taming all the tools and corralling the data they produce. So getting a clear, consistent and comprehensive answer can be a real challenge.
Enter exposure management, which gives you the processes and technologies you need to continuously assess the accessibility, exploitability and criticality of digital assets across all systems, applications, devices, resources and identities. As a result, it helps you tame security tool sprawl and works to bind all of that fragmented data together to provide a unified view. Rather than scrambling madly to find the right data when you get a question from your executive team or board, you’ll be able to answer them easily.
Last week, we shared how exposure management solutions can ease the three challenges that come with security tool sprawl. This week, we dig a bit deeper and explore six ways exposure management can help you work more effectively with all those tools.
1. Understanding everything your security tools tell you
With workloads spanning on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments, today’s IT environments are complex. Users interact with systems using a mix of devices, identities and access points. Security tools, many of which you probably acquired over time to solve specific problems, are often fragmented and don’t communicate beyond their individual siloes. The result: A blurred picture that doesn’t show you how all those pieces fit together or, critically, where the real threats are.
An exposure management platform helps you solve this problem with a foundation built on unified data, with a carefully considered design approach that supports:
- Cross-domain mapping: An exposure management platform must link assets across tools and environments. For example, a single human identity might possess elevated privileges in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Okta and multiple software as a service (SaaS) platforms. So exposure management should track that person as one entity.
- Normalization: Every security vendor has its own nomenclature and vocabulary. Tool A might describe risks in one way while Tool B might use different terminology. An exposure management platform can normalize terminology and build a common language and risk model so you can evaluate findings consistently.
- Correlation and scoring: An exposure management platform should evaluate relationships and assign risk based on interconnected factors such as device vulnerabilities, user privileges, poor hygiene, misconfigurations and external accessibility — not just static severity scores.
Must have: With an exposure management platform, you can consolidate risk data and insights into a single platform. This helps you streamline management and enables your teams to take more efficient, informed actions.
2. Figuring out how to prevent attackers from moving laterally in your organization
With a mix of cloud services, SaaS platforms, contractors, suppliers and external development teams, 21st century digital enterprises are highly interconnected. Those connections drive your productivity and keep you flexible. The problem is, they also expand the attack surface to previously unimagined breadth and depth. Once an attacker gains a foothold, the interconnected nature of your business systems make it possible for them to find a path to move laterally in pursuit of your most business-critical and sensitive systems and data.
Plus, not all of these assets and resources — even though they are yours — are under your direct control because they sit outside the traditional IT perimeter.
Without access to data about those assets, you have a blind spot in your cybersecurity landscape. So you put security tools in place to help you monitor and safeguard these assets, each of which is constantly churning out alerts and data. With the largest companies often using as many as 140 tools, security teams struggle to keep up. And you have no way to contextually analyze all this output so you can grasp where your organization is most exposed.
Must have: Attackers can connect exposures across your environment so they can move laterally and compromise critical assets. An exposure management platform helps you identify exposures across your environment in context, employing cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) so you can see how they connect and strategically address the ones that represent the greatest risk.
3. Uncovering weaknesses in your systems
Toxic combination of exposures lurking in your organization remain a top cause of breaches. In fact, according to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, attackers increasingly relied on exploiting vulnerabilities for initial entry and subsequent breaches, marking a 34% jump from the previous year.
Even if you have strong security policies in place, it’s easy to overlook certain weaknesses in your environment, such as open ports or a lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA). When combined, these factors form toxic combinations that can make it easier for an attacker to move laterally.
Weaknesses leading to a toxic combination include:
- Open ports
- A lack of multifactor authentication
- Unencrypted data and unauthorized or out-of-band changes
- Privileged access to a business-critical application
- Unpatched vulnerabilities on their device
- A device not covered by endpoint detection and response (EDR)
Must have: An exposure management platform can help you identify specific weaknesses that lead to toxic combinations. The contextual view exposure management provides allows you to map these weaknesses across security vendors and technologies.
4. Protecting your critical choke points
Choke points are a critical tactic in cybersecurity — they represent assets or exposures where multiple attack paths intersect. Devices that function as network choke points (e.g., firewalls, routers with ACLs, VPN concentrators, critical servers and API gateways) are often targeted by attackers as they look to move laterally in your environment. If an attacker can compromise a choke point, they can gain access to your entire network segments or critical data flows.
So mapping potential attack paths — including the sequences of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations an attacker could exploit to move through your network and reach critical assets — is a crucial step. An exposure management platform can help you manage choke points in three ways:
- Mapping: It can analyze MITRE ATT&CK techniques and help you map all attack paths.
- Analysis: It needs to identify which exposures are enabling the highest number of critical attack paths that could disrupt business operations or cause a breach.
- Mitigation: It provides strategies to eliminate attack paths and improve your overall security posture.
Must have: Exposure management software helps you identify and focus on the exposures that will most effectively reduce business risk, so you and your teams don’t get overwhelmed trying to address every single issue. It can also help you identify vulnerabilities on your choke point assets so you can prioritize them for remediation. If you remediate or use compensating control on one issue, you can eliminate dozens (or even hundreds) of potential attack paths. That’s the power of focusing on choke points.
5. Free yourself from spreadsheet sprawl
You’ve got too many dashboards to check, too many tools to manage and too much data to comb through. And chances are you’re trying to track and analyze all this using spreadsheets. The result? It’s easy to miss critical exposures. You need a unified dashboard you can use to track, analyze, and communicate risk from all your security data sources.
But what does unified data really mean? Lumping everything together in one dashboard is a decent start. But exposure management goes further. It aggregates, normalizes and correlates relevant data from across your environment, including domains, tools, clouds and identities. Then it evaluates it all holistically.
An exposure management platform can bring together the key data you need, including:
Must have: With aggregated information, an exposure management platform can map relationships across systems, perform attack path analysis and prioritize exposures for action based on how issues intersect.
6. Maximizing ROI from all your security tools
You’ve invested a lot in your current security tools. But when you add more point solutions for individual areas, you’ll often see diminishing returns because you lack the necessary technical and business context across different systems.
You’ll definitely see data noise, staff churn, hidden vulnerabilities and, ultimately, poor ROI.
So, to get the most out of your security investments, you need a unified strategy that integrates visibility with context across the entire attack surface. This will increase productivity and efficiency, enable you to demonstrate how you’ve reduced risks, lower your costs and significantly boost the ROI of all your security investments.
Must Have: An exposure management platform centralizes all the security data coming from your security tools, helping you streamline processes, cut costs and extract the most from your existing security investments.
Takeaways
You have a lot riding on all those security tools — the future of your organization and the success of your career. But, often, it’s hard to understand how those tools are performing. So it’s important to find a way to view the data from these tools in a unified, contextual manner that correlates exposures across your attack surface.
Exposure management gives you the ability to start managing risk from one place, with data and insights available in a single platform.
Your organization will be able to make clear-eyed decisions about how to handle your riskiest exposures and take action to eliminate them before they’re exploited.
Have a question about exposure management you’d like us to tackle?
We’re all ears. Share your question and maybe we’ll feature it in a future post.