Security teams are under more pressure than ever. With attack surfaces growing, regulations tightening, and the average breach cost climbing, it’s no surprise that many organizations are rethinking how they approach vulnerability management.
But here’s the catch: knowing where your vulnerabilities are isn’t the same as knowing how to fix them or whether they even matter.
In our latest whitepaper, Unified Exposure Management: Uncovering Unknown Assets and Vulnerabilities, we take a hard look at the limitations of traditional VM and what it really takes to keep up with modern attackers.
What’s broken?
The classic scan-and-patch routine was built for a different time — when assets were static, environments were simpler, and security teams weren’t stretched so thin. Today, vulnerabilities don’t just live on endpoints. They span hybrid cloud infrastructure, third-party apps, misconfigured identities, and external services.
Meanwhile, attackers have adapted. They don’t think in CVEs, they think in paths. They chain exposures together to move laterally, escalate privileges, and reach your crown jewels. Yet too many teams are still sorting vulnerabilities by CVSS scores and calling it risk management.
What’s needed instead?
You can’t secure what you can’t see. And you can’t prioritize what you don’t understand. That’s why a unified approach – one that combines asset, identity, and threat context is now essential.
Unified Exposure Management changes the game by helping you:
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Continuously discover unknown assets and identities
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Understand real-world exploitability, not just severity
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Prioritize what truly matters based on business impact
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Remediate exposures faster and more collaboratively
How Rapid7 can help
Our platform, Exposure Command, gives security leaders a single source of truth across cloud, on-prem, SaaS, and user access. It’s designed to help teams move from reactive triage to proactive risk reduction — and give CISOs a clearer picture of where risk lives, how it moves, and how to stop it.
Want the full breakdown? Download our whitepaper here.