What is Cybersecurity Exposure Management?

In today’s dynamic threat landscape, exposure management has emerged as a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity. It goes beyond traditional vulnerability management by continuously discovering and prioritizing exposures based on risk, criticality, and real-time threat activity.

Exposure management is a comprehensive and proactive security approach that involves discovering, analyzing, and prioritizing every point of digital exposure an organization faces, whether it’s a cloud-based VM, on-premises server, third-party integration, or abandoned dev subdomain.

Exposure management isn’t about listing vulnerabilities—it’s about continuously prioritizing and addressing the ones that matter most.

Rather than trying to chart every theoretical attack path, exposure management zeroes in on the most likely and most dangerous ones, especially those targeting critical assets across cloud, endpoints, and third-party environments.

Think of it as building a real-time blueprint of your digital environment’s weak spots, where data leaks, misconfigurations, or unauthorized access are most likely to occur.

The goal? Shrink the attack surface and strengthen defenses before attackers can strike.

Most organizations don’t know where their riskiest exposures are until it’s too late. Between cloud sprawl, remote work, third-party tools, and evolving threats, the modern attack surface is bigger and more dynamic than ever. Traditional vulnerability management can’t keep up. It was built for a slower, more predictable world.

To make exposure management actionable, many organizations are turning to a framework called Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Introduced by Gartner, CTEM brings structure, discipline, and repeatability to what might otherwise be a reactive or fragmented effort. More than a framework, it’s the foundation of modern exposure management.

In fact, you can’t really talk about exposure management today without talking about CTEM. The two are deeply connected: CTEM gives exposure management its operational rhythm and strategic clarity. It’s the “how” behind the “what.”

In this blog post, we’ll explore what exposure management is (and isn’t), walk through the exposure management lifecycle using the CTEM framework, examine how exposure management has evolved from traditional vulnerability management, and highlight best practices and benefits for organizations looking to reduce cyber risk and improve resilience.

By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of how exposure management works, how CTEM brings it to life, and how your organization can use both to stay ahead of evolving cybersecurity threats.

• What does exposure management do?
• Understanding the exposure management lifecycle
• The evolution of vulnerability management into exposure management
• Traditional vulnerability management challenges
• The introduction of vulnerability scanners
• The rise of red teaming and penetration testing
• Adopting a risk-based approach
• Modern vulnerability management is exposure management
• Exposure management vs. vulnerability management
• The importance of continuous monitoring
• Key benefits of exposure management
• Exposure management security tool types to know
• Applying AI to exposure management
• How autonomous endpoint management supports effective exposure management

What does exposure management do?

Exposure management helps organizations stay ahead of threats by continuously identifying and reducing risk. Unlike traditional vulnerability management, which focuses on listing and patching known flaws, it prioritizes exposures based on business impact, operational context, and real-time threat activity.

By integrating cyber risk exposure management with the CTEM framework, it helps strengthen security posture, ensure compliance, and optimize resources. Crucially, it also brings in business and IT stakeholders beyond the Security Operations Center (SOC), fostering a shared understanding of risk that aligns security priorities with organizational goals.

This cross-functional alignment is especially important because cyber threats constantly evolve, and an organization’s exposure can shift in an instant. That’s why exposure management must be ongoing, not a one-time task.

Consider these everyday scenarios:

• An employee’s laptop gets infected with malware after casual web browsing. When they reconnect to the corporate network, they unknowingly upload files that trigger a data breach.
• An employee signs up for an unsanctioned SaaS app that includes a vulnerable software module—putting shared data at risk.
• Endpoints from a newly acquired company haven’t been inventoried yet, and some begin scanning the network, creating blind spots and potential entry points.

These examples highlight why exposure management must be continuous and context-aware—not just a point-in-time assessment.

To stay ahead of these risks, organizations need full-spectrum visibility into where exposures can occur. That’s why exposure management continuously evaluates potential attack vectors across:

• On-premises IT assets
• Remote environments like branch offices, shared workspaces, and home setups
• SaaS applications and cloud services
• Third-party platforms, integrations, and services the organization relies on

By aligning risk assessment with business impact and operational context, exposure management helps organizations prioritize and act on the exposures that matter most—whether they stem from misconfigured ports, unmonitored assets, or gaps in access control policies. The result: stronger cyber resilience and a reduced risk of breaches and incidents.

However, identifying exposures is only the beginning. To make exposure management truly effective, organizations need a repeatable, structured process. That’s where the exposure management lifecycle comes in.

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Understanding the exposure management lifecycle

The exposure management lifecycle encompasses the entire journey of managing cyber exposures from start to finish. While it includes many processes, it is also structured in a cyclical manner to ensure continuous monitoring, improvement, and risk mitigation—ensuring proactive measures are taken continuously to bolster your defenses against new and potential threats.

Gartner’s CTEM framework outlines five stages that many IT practitioners now use as the standard for the exposure management lifecycle. These stages include:

• Scoping: Defining the scope and objectives of the exposure management efforts, including the attack surface and critical assets to prioritize
• Discovery: Identifying assets, vulnerabilities, and potential threats across your environment as defined by your scope to fully understand the landscape from an attacker’s perspective
• Prioritization: Performing exposure prioritization to rank vulnerabilities based on their risk level and potential impact to determine which threats to address first and allocate resources more efficiently
• Validation: Continuously verifying the effectiveness of remediation efforts and overall security posture through ongoing monitoring and assessment
• Mobilization: Taking action to address identified threats and vulnerabilities
  
  Mobilization ensures that steps are taken to mitigate these risks effectively and promptly. This work includes coordinating with relevant teams, obtaining approvals, and implementing the required security measures to enhance the organization’s overall security posture.

The exposure management lifecycle is the overarching framework that guides these processes in a continuous, iterative manner. The lifecycle ensures that exposure management is not a one-time effort, or even a quarterly or biannual project. Rather, it’s an ongoing practice that evolves with the changing threat landscape. Often, multiple assessments may be running continuously to ensure that all aspects of exposures are properly understood and addressed during the organization’s evolving operations.

However, exposure management didn’t appear out of nowhere—it evolved from decades of vulnerability management practices. Here’s how that journey unfolded.

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The evolution of vulnerability management into exposure management

In the ever-changing landscape of cybersecurity, vulnerability management has transformed dramatically. It began as a response to the first viruses and Trojans: risk mitigation reduced to a simple list of possible vulnerabilities and recommended patches to eliminate them.

Today, the vast majority of real-world threats—those actively being used by attackers—are flying under the radar of one of the most widely referenced vulnerability lists.

This is a critical blind spot for organizations that rely solely on KEV to guide their remediation efforts. It underscores the need for a broader, more dynamic approach to vulnerability management—one that accounts for exploitation activity beyond what’s officially cataloged.

As CTEM gains traction, vulnerability management has evolved into a practice that draws upon not only vulnerability lists, but also comprehensive endpoint inventories and a prioritized understanding of possible attack vectors—based not only on IT investments and security postures but also the organization’s strategic business goals.

But traditional vulnerability management came with its own set of challenges—ones that exposure management aims to solve. Here’s a quick look at how—and why—the important discipline of vulnerability management has evolved.

 
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Traditional vulnerability management challenges

Traditional vulnerability management was a manual and reactive process, where security teams relied on advisories and vendor bulletins to track vulnerabilities and basic tools like antivirus software and manual patching to address security flaws, often limited to Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) across endpoints, servers, and infrastructure.

The early days of vulnerability management were like a game of whack-a-mole: security teams were constantly reacting to new vulnerabilities as they popped up, trying to patch them as quickly as possible. This approach was not only exhausting but also left many systems vulnerable for long periods.

One recent breach in particular shows just how costly those gaps can be. Let’s take a closer look at what happened with MOVEit.

MOVEit breach case study:
A failure in exposure management

The 2023 MOVEit breach exposed a critical flaw in traditional vulnerability management: speed. Attackers exploited a zero-day in the file transfer tool before most organizations even knew it existed—compromising data from over 2,600 companies and nearly 100 million people. Using automated exploits, they infiltrated systems before public disclosure, bypassing defenses and revealing a systemic weakness in digital risk management.

What made this breach especially instructive was not just the existence of a vulnerability—but the speed and scale at which it was exploited. Organizations relying on periodic scans and manual patching were caught off guard. The breach underscored how traditional vulnerability management—focused on known CVEs and scheduled remediation cycles—was insufficient in a world where attackers move faster than defenders can respond.

In response to these types of security incidents, the industry began to evolve. One of the first major shifts? Automated vulnerability scanners.

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The introduction of vulnerability scanners

As the threat landscape changed and grew, it became clear that a new type of tool was needed to support the evolving needs of security teams.

Vulnerability scanners have been around since the late 90s, but in the 2000s, automated vulnerability scanners emerged as a solution to quickly identify known vulnerabilities across vast networks.

While these tools can scan thousands of systems quickly, identifying misconfigurations, outdated software, and security gaps, the flood of details vulnerability scanners provide led to a new problem: information overload.

Security teams were bombarded with alerts, making it difficult to prioritize which vulnerabilities to address first.

So, even with vulnerability scanners and improved automation, security teams were still missing a clear understanding of:

• Which vulnerabilities mattered most in the context of the organization’s mission and daily operations
  
  Even if scanners provided a more complete picture of vulnerabilities across the organization’s attack surface, security teams—often understaffed and overwhelmed—still struggled to identify which issues truly mattered. Without clear context around business-critical assets and processes, prioritization remained guesswork, leaving high-risk exposures unresolved.
• Vulnerabilities beyond the reach of their scanners
  
  Today’s attack surface is sprawling and dynamic—spanning cloud workloads, SaaS platforms, third-party systems, shadow IT, and unmanaged assets. Traditional scanners, built for static, on-prem environments, simply can’t keep up, which leads to critical blind spots across both cloud and on-prem infrastructure that leave organizations exposed to unseen risks.

To truly understand how attackers might exploit vulnerabilities in the real world, security teams began adopting more hands-on approaches like red teaming and penetration testing.

 
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The rise of red teaming and penetration testing

To address the limitations of automated scanners and the need for deeper validation, organizations began incorporating red teaming and penetration testing into their security strategies.

Red teaming, a practice formalized by the U.S. Department of Defense to simulate adversarial thinking, has roots in Cold War-era military simulations where “red” teams represented enemy forces and “blue” teams represented friendly forces. This terminology and approach were later adopted by the security and cybersecurity communities to uncover vulnerabilities and evaluate the effectiveness of defenses.

In a red team exercise, a group of trusted cybersecurity experts—essentially friendly hackers—sets an objective for a simulated attack, such as breaching a key financial application. They may use tools like scripts sourced from the dark web to exploit known vulnerabilities or rely on tactics like social engineering to achieve their goal.

A corresponding blue team may be tasked with detecting and defending against the simulated intrusion. After the exercise, both teams review the results to identify weaknesses and recommend improvements to strengthen the organization’s security posture.

Building on these military strategies, penetration testing, or pentesting, was developed to provide a more focused method for testing the vulnerability of specific systems. Originally used to assess the security of defense infrastructure, pentesting evolved into a hands-on cybersecurity exercise where ethical hackers simulate real-world attacks in a controlled environment.

The goal is to identify and exploit vulnerabilities to understand how an attacker might break through. Unlike automated scans, pentesting is typically manual and highly targeted, zeroing in on a defined set of defenses to expose weak points before they can be exploited.

Together, red teaming and pentesting use realistic attack simulations to uncover hidden vulnerabilities and reveal how attackers might exploit them—helping organizations strengthen their overall security posture.

While these tactical methods have strengthened defenses, they weren’t designed to deliver a continuous or contextualized view of risk. Red teaming and pentesting offer valuable insights—but only at a point in time, and often without clear prioritization based on business impact.

The next evolution in exposure management was about bringing context—shifting from isolated testing to continuous, risk-informed decision-making. Enter risk-based vulnerability management.

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Adopting a risk-based approach

Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) emerged as the next evolution in response to the growing complexity of enterprise environments and the limitations of earlier approaches. While scanners could surface thousands of issues and red teaming could simulate real-world attacks, organizations still lacked a way to continuously prioritize vulnerabilities based on actual risk to their business.

Rather than treating all vulnerabilities as equal, organizations began to assess each one in context—factoring in potential business impact, exploitability, and asset criticality. This shift acknowledged a key reality: not every vulnerability demands immediate attention.

Enabled by advances in threat intelligence, asset discovery, and data correlation, RBVM platforms gave security teams the ability to move beyond static severity scores like CVSS.

Instead of asking, “What’s the highest score?”, teams could now consider questions like:

• Is this vulnerability actively being exploited in the wild?
• Does it affect a high-value or exposed asset?
• What would the business impact be if it were exploited?

By layering this context over traditional scoring, RBVM enables smarter prioritization and more efficient remediation—helping teams focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most.

See how unified visibility transforms your security posture
—download the Tanium guide now

But while RBVM marked a major step forward, it wasn’t the final answer. Many organizations still found themselves reacting to threats rather than anticipating them. Remediation remained largely manual, and the focus on known vulnerabilities meant other critical risks—like misconfigurations, excessive permissions, or zero-day threats—often went undetected.

Managing vulnerabilities at scale also proved difficult. Even with better prioritization, security teams—especially those with limited resources—struggled to keep up. And while RBVM brought much-needed context, it didn’t always provide the continuous visibility or automation needed to stay ahead of fast-moving threats.

Exposure management is all about optimizing your path to protection. The goal is to identify your weakest areas and address them first. It’s about helping you prioritize. Because if you can’t cover every policy and follow up with metrics, then at the very least, you are plugging up the areas that attackers can potentially see.¹

And that brings us to where we are today: a shift from reactive patching to proactive exposure reduction.

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Modern vulnerability management is exposure management

Exposure management represents the next evolution of vulnerability management. It builds on the strengths—and addresses the limitations—of traditional approaches by not only identifying and remediating known risks but also proactively monitoring, assessing, and mitigating potential threats before they escalate into breaches, ransomware attacks, outages, or compliance failures.

This modern approach emphasizes maintaining a resilient security posture through real-time visibility, automated remediation, and comprehensive risk management. As digital environments grow more complex—with cloud services, remote workforces, and third-party integrations—exposure management helps organizations stay ahead of evolving threats.

Due to the evolving threat landscape and expanding attack surface, a continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) approach is now necessary to effectively address diverse threats and reduce exposure.²

In the age of AI, SaaS proliferation, and hyperconnectivity, managing risk through a static list of vulnerabilities is no longer enough. Exposure management must account for dynamic environments, from remote endpoints to unmanaged devices and cloud-native applications.

Organizations need an approach that is:

• More comprehensive: Encompassing everything from officially provisioned endpoints to SaaS platforms, third-party tools, and dynamic cloud environments
• Prioritized: Recognizing the critical assets and business-critical processes essential to an organization
• Automated: Taking advantage of machine learning and other technologies to relieve IT workloads while accelerating threat detection and remediation
• Centralized: Providing a unified view of potential vulnerabilities across all endpoints, SaaS applications, and software and hardware involved in an organization’s daily operations

To appreciate the significance of this evolution in IT security, let’s take a closer look at how today’s exposure management differs from traditional vulnerability management.

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Exposure management vs. vulnerability management

When it comes to securing an organization’s digital assets, both exposure management and vulnerability management play crucial roles. However, they serve distinct functions and offer different levels of protection.

Vulnerability management focuses on identifying, assessing, and managing known vulnerabilities within an organization’s systems. This process can involve:

• Asset assessment: Manually defining the assets to be assessed for vulnerabilities
• Organizing findings: Using the CVSS to understand the risk associated with vulnerabilities
• Scanning: Searching systems for known vulnerabilities and assessing their severity
• Action: Deciding whether to accept the risk, mitigate the vulnerability, or remediate it through patching or upgrading
• Reassessment: Repeating the process to find new vulnerabilities

While this process has been foundational for years, it’s no longer sufficient on its own. Exposure management builds on and expands this approach to address today’s dynamic and distributed threat landscape. Here’s how the two compare:

Approach	Traditional vulnerability management	Modern exposure management
Focus	Known software vulnerabilities	All digital exposures, including misconfigurations, shadow IT, and third-party risks
Approach	Reactive and periodic	Proactive and continuous
Scope	Primarily on-premises IT assets	Full attack surface: cloud, SaaS, endpoints, third-party, remote workspaces
Prioritization	Based on static severity scores	Based on business impact, exploitability, and real-time threat intelligence
Stakeholders	Primarily security teams	Cross-functional: security, IT, business units
Validation	Manual patching and periodic reassessment	Continuous validation and automated remediation
Outcome	Patch known vulnerabilities	Reduce overall attack surface and improve cyber resilience

Exposure management takes a more proactive approach to uncover, evaluate, and mitigate security risks tied to digital assets. It goes beyond just identifying known software flaws and instead uncovers potential exposures across the entire tech stack to identify possible infiltration routes and misconfigurations.

For example, unlike basic vulnerability scans, exposure management continuously monitors the environment and uses “what if” scenario analysis to identify silent expansions or user errors that may not be easily detected in regular scans.

Taking this broader, more open-ended approach to security is critical. It provides organizations with a framework for assessing potential threats beyond those that can be derived from vulnerabilities that have already been identified. With new security threats always appearing and organizations always deploying new technologies—everything from SaaS applications to AI models—broadening the scope of detecting and managing security exposures becomes essential.

The Vulnerability Management industry is evolving from targeted vulnerability identification and remediation to a more holistic exposure management approach referred to by Gartner as Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). This represents a paradigm shift for vulnerability management from prioritizing based purely on the threat type and severity to focusing our remediation strategy on potential business impact.³

In recent years, the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks have steadily increased, making broad and continuous exposure management more critical than ever. CTEM addresses this need by enabling organizations to monitor and respond to threats in real time—because in today’s landscape, exposures don’t wait.

This need for real-time responsiveness is exactly why exposure management must be continuous. Unlike traditional vulnerability management, exposure management doesn’t stop. It’s built on ongoing monitoring and adaptation—bringing together business and IT stakeholders to stay ahead of evolving threats.

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The importance of continuous monitoring

Cyberattacks don’t wait for quarterly scans or annual audits. They happen in real time, and so should your defenses.

That’s why continuous monitoring isn’t just a feature of exposure management—it’s the foundation that makes it effective.

In many organizations, exposure management efforts remain fragmented and inconsistent. One team might run vulnerability scans just once a month. Another might only review cloud misconfigurations on a quarterly basis. Meanwhile, attackers are actively probing for weaknesses every hour, across every layer of the environment.

Without continuous visibility, exposures go undetected, risks go unprioritized, and remediation lags behind exploitation.

Continuous monitoring solves this by keeping your exposure management program dynamic and responsive to both known and emerging threats. It ensures that every stage of the CTEM lifecycle is fueled by real-time data and up-to-date context.

Here’s how continuous monitoring makes a measurable difference:

• Spot risks as they emerge: Continuous scanning uncovers vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in real time-so teams can prioritize based on current risk, not outdated data.
• Accelerate incident response: Active threats are surfaced faster, and remediation efforts can be validated on the fly-reducing dwell time and limiting damage.
• Prevent issues before they escalate: Automated detection of unauthorized changes or policy drift helps teams stay ahead of potential breaches and compliance gaps.

Continuous monitoring is a core component of CTEM, but it’s not the whole story. A comprehensive CTEM strategy also brings structure, prioritization, and cross-team coordination—ensuring that monitoring leads to meaningful action.

So, what does all this effort get you? Let’s look at the real-world benefits of doing exposure management right.

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Key benefits of exposure management

Exposure management isn’t just a security upgrade—it’s a strategic advantage. When done right, it helps organizations move faster, act smarter, and stay ahead of threats that traditional vulnerability management often misses.

By continuously identifying, prioritizing, and addressing the exposures that matter most, exposure management delivers impactful results across security, operations, and compliance. Here’s what that looks like:

• Enhances risk assessments: Exposure management gives you a complete, real-time view of your cyber risk landscape. By combining threat intelligence, vulnerability data, and attack surface insights, it helps you focus on what’s truly urgent—not just what’s noisy.
• Ensures business continuity: By reducing your attack surface and closing off high-risk entry points, exposure management helps prevent disruptions and keeps critical systems running—even when threats are active.
• Improves security posture: It enables security teams to detect and remediate vulnerabilities across the full IT estate, including cloud services, SaaS apps, remote endpoints, and third-party integrations.
• Protects sensitive data: Exposure management helps prevent breaches by identifying weak spots before attackers do, reducing the risk of data loss or compromise.
• Boosts IT efficiency: By surfacing the exposures that matter most, it helps IT and security teams prioritize their time and resources—eliminating guesswork and reducing alert fatigue.
• Increases agility: With clearer priorities and real-time visibility, teams can act quickly and confidently knowing they’re focused on the exposures that pose the greatest risk.
• Supports compliance: Exposure management helps organizations meet evolving regulatory requirements (like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and NIST CSF 2.0) by providing continuous evidence of risk reduction and control effectiveness.

[Read also: What is IT compliance? Basic overview and guidelines]

These benefits aren’t just theoretical—they’re already being realized by organizations modernizing their endpoint and risk management strategies.

One example: the University of Salford. While their journey began with a need for real-time visibility and centralized vulnerability management, its integrated approach with Tanium, ServiceNow, and Microsoft reflects many of the same principles that define effective exposure management today.

Customer case study: University of Salford

When the University of Salford first implemented Tanium, the goal was to gain real-time visibility across its network. The results were immediate: the platform quickly uncovered hundreds of shadow IT endpoints and thousands of missing critical patches and vulnerabilities.

Additionally, by integrating Tanium with ServiceNow CMDB and Microsoft Sentinel, the university established a single source of truth across platforms—helping them identify and mitigate threats before they can cause harm.

 

Read the full case study for a deeper dive into how the University of Salford is using Tanium to accelerate response times, improve risk assessment, and drive stronger collaboration between IT operations and security teams.

As the University of Salford’s experience shows, visibility, speed, and integration are critical—but they don’t happen by accident. They’re made possible by the right mix of technologies working together.

Let’s explore the categories of tools that make exposure management possible—and how to choose the ones that best support your environment.

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Exposure management security tool types to know

From identifying and managing internet-facing assets to ensuring the security of cloud environments and endpoint devices, the market is flooded with solutions tailored to tackle the distinct challenges of managing and mitigating exposure risks.

However, this abundance of tools often leads to significant overlap, creating a complex and sometimes overwhelming environment for security teams, and it makes it challenging for organizations to determine which tools are essential and how to integrate them effectively.

To help you better understand the common types of solutions available to support your exposure management efforts, we’ve organized these tools based on their primary functions and strengths. This categorization aims to clarify their specific focus areas and demonstrate how they can be leveraged to enhance your organization’s security posture:

Attack surface management

• Attack Surface Management (ASM) solutions: Identify, analyze, and manage all internet-facing assets, including shadow IT and misconfigured cloud resources, by gaining visibility into an organization’s attack surface, which helps with mitigating risks before they can be exploited
• Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM): Provide visibility and management of cyber assets (internal and external), helping organizations identify, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities across their attack surface
• External Attack Surface Management (EASM): Focuses on identifying, monitoring, and securing an organization’s external-facing digital assets, such as domains, cloud services, exposed APIs, and third-party integrations, helping security teams understand their exposure from an attacker’s perspective and take proactive steps to mitigate risks

[Read also: What is Cybersecurity Asset Management (CSAM)? Definition, benefits, and trends]

Data security, risk, and compliance

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions: Continuously monitor and assess cloud security configurations to help manage and secure cloud environments and ensure that cloud assets remain compliant with security policies and best practices
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions: Monitor, detect, and prevent the unauthorized transmission of sensitive data to protect against data breaches, insider threats, and regulatory noncompliance by applying security policies across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments to ensure data integrity and compliance with industry regulations
• Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solutions: Provide visibility into sensitive data locations, access permissions, security posture, and usage patterns to prevent data breaches and compliance violations
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platforms: Help organizations manage governance, risk, and compliance requirements effectively
• Security Configuration Management (SCM) tools: Ensure security configurations are correctly applied and maintained across systems according to security best practices and compliance frameworks, helping prevent misconfigurations that lead to security gaps

Endpoint management and security

• Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs): Designed to protect cloud-native applications by integrating security throughout the application lifecycle
• DevSecOps and Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) platforms: Integrate security into software development pipelines, ensuring applications are scanned and secured before deployment
• Endpoint management platforms: Configure, patch, and deploy operating systems and applications for enterprise endpoints to ensure cybersecurity hygiene and operational efficiency across all devices
• Operational Technology (OT) security solutions: Protect industrial control systems (ICS), IoT, and other non-traditional IT environments that are critical to industries like manufacturing, energy, and healthcare
• Patch management tools: Ensure timely deployment of security patches across systems and applications, reducing the window of exposure to vulnerabilities
• Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions: Analyze software applications and containerized environments to detect open-source and third-party software components with known vulnerabilities, licensing risks, or outdated security patches

Identity and access management

• Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) platforms: Monitor, renew, and automate management of digital certificates to prevent expired or compromised certificates from causing outages or security risks
• Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) platforms: Detect and respond to identity-based threats, such as credential abuse, misconfigurations, and privilege escalation, ensuring secure access and identity management

[Read also: What is Identity and Access Management (IAM)?]

Incident detection and response

• Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms: Integrate multiple security products into a cohesive system to provide comprehensive threat detection and response across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems: Collect, analyze, and correlate security event data from various sources to detect and respond to security incidents
• Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms: Automate and coordinate security operations, including incident response, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management, to improve efficiency and effectiveness
• Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): Aggregate and analyze cyber threat data from various sources to provide actionable intelligence for proactive threat hunting and incident response

Vulnerability management

• Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs): Assess and prioritize exposure risks across various assets and environments, with the ability to integrate with discovery tools to enhance visibility into security risks, which helps organizations make informed decisions to protect their assets
• Risk-based vulnerability management solutions: Prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk factors beyond CVSS scores, incorporating exploitability, asset criticality, and business context by focusing on continuous assessment and prioritization of vulnerabilities
• Vulnerability assessment solutions: Identify, categorize, and prioritize security vulnerabilities while providing remediation guidance to mitigate risks by focusing on security configuration assessments and compliance reporting

While each tool in the exposure management ecosystem promises to solve a specific problem—whether it’s identifying cloud misconfigurations, scanning for vulnerabilities, or monitoring third-party risk—the reality is far messier. Many of these tools overlap in functionality, speak different languages, and operate in silos. For example, ASM and EASM both focus on external-facing assets, while CAASM tries to bridge internal and external visibility—but often without full integration or shared context.

Simply performing a vulnerability assessment that generates a large list of vulnerabilities may satisfy compliance requirements, but it will not lead to improved security posture.²

This fragmented tooling landscape creates more noise than clarity. Security teams are left stitching together dashboards, reconciling conflicting data, and trying to prioritize risk across disconnected systems. That’s not just inefficient—it’s risky.

That’s why AI is becoming essential. It’s not just about empowering better IT automation—it’s about making sense of the chaos. AI can help correlate signals across tools, surface the exposures that matter most, and deliver actionable insights that accelerate response.

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Applying AI to exposure management

With so many tools claiming to manage risk, automate response, and improve visibility, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But not all exposure management platforms are created equal, especially when it comes to how they use AI.

[Read also: The ultimate guide to AI in cybersecurity]

AI isn’t just a buzzword. In exposure management, it’s quickly becoming the engine that powers real-time detection, prioritization, and response. The right platform should help you cut through noise, reduce manual effort, and act faster on what matters most.

Here are six key questions to guide your evaluation of AI capabilities in any exposure management solution:

1. Does the platform provide real-time visibility into all endpoints, including remote, unmanaged, and cloud-connected assets?
   
   Look for solutions that offer comprehensive telemetry across your entire environment, ensuring no asset is left unmonitored.
2. Can it use AI and advanced analytics to detect exposures and prioritize them based on business risk?
   
   Effective platforms apply AI to assess exploitability, asset criticality, and business context—not just static scores.

Discover how confidence scores can help your team cut through the noise and focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most
—download the IDC Perspective

3. Does it automate remediation workflows such as patching, configuration enforcement, and incident response?
   
   Automation should streamline response actions, reduce manual effort, and accelerate time to resolution.
4. Can it reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) through AI-driven insights and orchestration?
   
   The right platform should support rapid triage and automated containment to minimize dwell time and impact.

[Read also: How AI for automation will revolutionize today’s IT workflows]

5. Does it support compliance reporting and audit readiness with real-time, AI-enhanced insights?
   
   Ensure the platform can generate audit-ready reports and continuously monitor compliance against key cybersecurity frameworks.
6. Can it consolidate multiple point tools into a unified platform to reduce complexity and improve efficiency?
   
   A strong solution should unify endpoint management, risk assessment, compliance, and threat response to reduce tool sprawl and operational overhead.

AI is just the beginning. The real advantage comes when AI capabilities are unified into a single platform—one that not only detects and prioritizes exposures, but also streamlines response, reduces complexity, and drives faster outcomes.

When security incidents occur, speed is everything—and the advantage won’t be simply having AI, but how you apply it. Organizations can respond faster and more effectively when threat intelligence, asset context, and response controls are all available in one cohesive environment.

At Tanium, we’ve built our platform to support this exact kind of exposure management—real-time, unified, and scalable by design.

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How autonomous endpoint management supports effective exposure management

In today’s overwhelming and fragmented security landscape, the Tanium platform provides autonomous endpoint management (AEM) to deliver a unified approach to exposure management that simplifies operations and improves the speed and precision of security outcomes.

By integrating capabilities like Tanium Risk & Compliance directly into our AEM framework, Tanium enables organizations to continuously identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities all from a single platform. With real-time visibility into every endpoint and automated workflows for patching and configuration enforcement, Tanium helps teams reduce risk, ensure compliance, and act faster.

Find out how Tanium helps you stay ahead of risk and compliance—download the solution brief to take the next step

To be effective, exposure management must be both comprehensive and timely. Tanium AEM delivers detailed, real-time insights across managed and unmanaged endpoints, along with responsive controls to address exposures quickly and at scale—even in the most complex enterprise environments.

Tanium AEM empowers teams to manage risk at scale and in real time. Here’s how:

• Real-time visibility into your entire endpoint landscape, including remote, off-network, and cloud-connected assets
• Comprehensive telemetry across your environment to uncover hidden risks and blind spots
• Custom segmentation by business unit, geography, or asset type for targeted monitoring and reporting

• Automated patching and configuration enforcement across OS and software
• Integrated workflows to apply updates, enforce policies, and respond to threats without manual effort
• Rapid incident response to isolate compromised assets and contain threats before they spread

• Audit-ready reporting with real-time scan data and risk scores
• Support for regulatory frameworks like NIST CSF, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more
• Unified risk, compliance, and security controls management through a single agent and platform

• Native integrations with ServiceNow and Microsoft solutions accelerate remediation and streamline workflows
• Scale effortlessly across even the largest, most distributed environments
• Minimize network impact with Tanium’s distributed architecture

Exposure management isn’t just a trend—it’s a necessary evolution in how organizations defend against modern threats. With the right tools and strategy, teams can move from reactive patching to proactive risk reduction. Tanium helps make that shift possible.

With Tanium, security teams can manage risk and compliance at scale, ensuring that all endpoints are kept up to date with the latest security patches and configurations, enabling organizations to maintain control of their environment with confidence and in real time.

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Managing vulnerabilities and ensuring continuous compliance is more critical than ever. Schedule a demo to see how Tanium can help your organization achieve continuous exposure management, compliance enforcement, and an improved security posture.