Cybersecurity is always changing, but two things remain constant
— the need to manage vulnerabilities and cut risk exposure. After all, how else can you reliably protect your data and infrastructure?
In that regard, exposure management stands out as a pillar of cybersecurity programs. It aims to identify, assess, and mitigate security threats before they turn into full-fledged incidents. Through exposure management, you achieve two objectives: You reduce your attack surface and make attackers’ lives more difficult.
Exposure Management Defined
Exposure management means evaluating and controlling your organization’s openness to security risks. “Exposure” here refers to any exploitable weakness, vulnerability, or gap in your IT environment. It can occur in your systems, networks, applications, or even human processes.
The goal of exposure management is to find security risks and take steps to reduce them. This allows you to prevent severe threats, such as data breaches, malware infections, and denial-of-service attacks.
How Does Exposure Management Work?
Exposure management works through a cycle of continuous assessment, mitigation, and monitoring:
- Discovery: The first step is to identify all the assets within your organization’s infrastructure. It includes mapping out networks, systems, and applications that threat actors can target. The discovery phase ensures that you do not overlook any possible entry points.
- Assessment: Once you identify your assets, the next step is to assess your exposure to threats. This phase includes estimating the potential risk of each vulnerability. It takes into account everything from severity and exploitability to business impact.
- Mitigation: After assessing the risks, exposure management focuses on taking corrective actions. That can involve patching vulnerabilities, updating configurations, or implementing better access controls. The goal is to lower the likelihood of actual exploitation.
- Continuous Monitoring: Since cyber threats evolve constantly, exposure management requires ongoing vigilance. Constant system monitoring allows you to detect new vulnerabilities and prepare for future risks.
Exposure Management vs. Vulnerability Management
Exposure management and vulnerability management share similar goals, but they are not identical.
Vulnerability management focuses on identifying, classifying, and fixing vulnerabilities within individual systems or applications. It concentrates more narrowly on addressing specific weaknesses in specific units.
Exposure management, on the other hand, takes a broader, more strategic view. It looks at your organization as a whole and evaluates how threat actors could exploit different security gaps, aiming to reduce the overall attack surface. To achieve this, it looks at all the potential exposure points across your entire IT environment.
Examples of Exposure Management in Use
Imagine a company with a legacy application that hasn’t been updated in years. This outdated system may contain numerous vulnerabilities that attackers can effortlessly exploit. Thanks to exposure management, the company would:
- Discover the application’s weaknesses.
- Assess the risk these vulnerabilities pose to data security and business continuity.
- Apply mitigation measures, patches, or upgrades to reduce the exposure.
Another example is a company that uses cloud services with misconfigured permissions. This state exposes sensitive company data to unauthorized users. Exposure management would allow the company to identify the misconfigurations, fix them by adjusting access controls, and continuously monitor the cloud environment to ensure that no further exposure occurs.
By addressing risks in this way, exposure management helps reduce the chances of a successful cyberattack. A robust exposure management program ensures that systems remain secure in the face of changing threats.
A Proven Approach to a Safer IT Infrastructure
Exposure management is a proactive cybersecurity approach. It enables you to identify, evaluate, and mitigate risks across your entire infrastructure. It’s the only way your organization can minimize openness to cyberattacks and guarantee a safer tomorrow.