In the evolving threat landscape, traditional vulnerability management is no longer enough to ensure a secure environment. Gartner’s How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management report points out that simply creating prioritized lists of vulnerabilities falls short in addressing the broader spectrum of exposures, leaving critical gaps in an organization’s security posture. Security operations managers face increasing challenges in operationalizing vulnerability data across dynamic and complex environments. To address these challenges, organizations must transition from traditional vulnerability management to a more holistic approach: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). This strategy extends beyond vulnerabilities to include misconfigurations, identity risks, shadow IT, and other exposures. By enabling continuous visibility, prioritization, and remediation across the entire attack surface, exposure management provides security teams with the tools needed to take proactive and informed action to mitigate risks.
Steps to Evolve Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management
Step 1: Enhance Visibility
Effective exposure management begins with a comprehensive view of the organization’s cyber assets and attack surface. JupiterOne integrates with existing tools across the IT and security stack to consolidate data into a single pane of glass. By providing a unified view of assets, vulnerabilities, and associated metadata, JupiterOne eliminates the blind spots caused by siloed systems. This enhanced visibility enables security teams to identify unmanaged or high-risk assets and ensures they have a full understanding of the attack surface.
Step 2: Prioritize Business-Critical Exposures
Not all vulnerabilities pose equal risks, and addressing them without context can lead to inefficient resource allocation. JupiterOne prioritizes vulnerabilities by incorporating factors such as business impact, asset dependencies, and exploitability. By aligning remediation efforts with the organization’s critical operations, security teams can focus on addressing exposures that pose the greatest threat to business continuity. This ensures that security efforts are both targeted and impactful.
Step 3: Automate and Streamline Processes
Manual processes in vulnerability management often lead to inefficiencies and delayed responses. JupiterOne streamlines these workflows by automating tasks such as data consolidation, gap identification, and remediation workflows. With JupiterOne, security operation managers can establish workflows that automatically flag and address exposures, reducing the operational burden on other teams and enabling faster, more accurate response times. This shift allows teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine tasks.
Step 4: Enable Proactive Decision-Making
Exposure management is most effective when security teams can act before vulnerabilities become breaches. JupiterOne supports proactive decision-making by enabling teams to query their asset inventory in real-time, uncover relationships between assets, and assess the potential blast radius of exposures. This contextual intelligence allows security managers to answer critical questions about their attack surface, identify emerging risks, and take preemptive actions to minimize threats.
From Gartner “Given the wide range of attack surfaces, security operations managers need to narrow them down by answering the following questions:”
- Which attack surfaces are easy targets, easy to get into or easy to see?
FIND (Internet|everyone)THAT (ALLOWS|CONNECTS) << as rule (Firewall| Network)THAT PROTECTS >> NetworkInterfaceTHAT USES << HostWHERE rule.ingress = truereturn tree
- Which attack surfaces have attractive targets hiding behind them?
FIND (DataStore | Function | Application | CodeRepo | Host| Device | CryptoKey | AccessKey)THAT RELATES TO #CriticalAssetRETURN TREE
The Business Impact of Exposure Management
Exposure management transforms how organizations protect their digital environments, delivering measurable business impact and operational resilience. High-risk exposures, like unpatched vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, are often the starting points for breaches that Gartner estimates cost an average of $4.45 million per incident globally.
Beyond prevention, exposure management enable security teams to act faster and more effectively when threats arise. Accelerating metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), it enables teams to respond with confidence, supported by actionable insights and a comprehensive view of the attack surface.
Exposure management automates critical processes like asset inventory and vulnerability prioritization, freeing up resources and eliminating manual bottlenecks. This automation ensures not only greater efficiency but also real-time compliance monitoring, aligning security efforts with regulatory requirements. Together, these benefits make exposure management an essential strategy for reducing risk and enabling smarter, faster, and more cost-effective security operations.
Download the Gartner report: How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management for actionable insights on evolving your approach. Ready to see how JupiterOne can help you transition to exposure management and enhance your security posture? Schedule a demo today.
