What is Exposure Management?
As companies update and expand their IT infrastructure, they introduce new vulnerabilities and attack vectors. At the same time, cyber threat actors are refining their techniques and developing new ones, identifying new risks to existing assets.
Exposure management is the practice of mapping the company’s digital attack surface and developing and implementing strategies to address these security risks. Exposure management is a critical component of a corporate cybersecurity program.
The Role of Exposure Management in Building Cybersecurity Programs
The purpose of a cybersecurity program is to manage an organization’s exposure to potential cyber threats. This includes both proactively attempting to identify and close security holes before they can be exploited by an attacker and reactively identifying, blocking, and remediating ongoing attacks.
Exposure management is an important part of an organization’s proactive cybersecurity operations. By mapping its attack surface and identifying vulnerabilities in it, an organization can determine where and how it is most likely to be attacked. This information informs cybersecurity operations by indicating where an organization should take action to address the potential cyber risks to the company.
How to Build an Exposure Management Program
To get started with an exposure management program, follow these steps.
Audit Existing Security Visibility Architecture
Many organizations have at least partial visibility into their digital attack surface. For example, an organization may run periodic vulnerability scans and penetration tests or maintain an inventory of the hardware and software used by the organization.
The first step in developing an exposure management program is performing an audit of the company’s existing exposure management architecture and programs. For example, the organization should determine which solutions it has and the level of integration that exists between them. A comprehensive array of security monitoring solutions provides little benefit if they are siloed and only offer partial visibility into an organization’s attack surface.
Identify Visibility Gaps
After determining the scope of its existing security monitoring architecture, an organization can start to assess its effectiveness at monitoring potential exposures. This involves determining what the organization needs to have visibility into, what it can currently see, and any gaps between the two.
This step depends on a clear understanding of an organization’s existing IT and security architectures. The company needs to know what externally facing assets it has, what internal assets it has, such as devices, and how each of its existing risk monitoring solutions and processes covers them. Potential gaps not only include overlooked assets but also vulnerabilities on known assets.
After identifying existing visibility gaps, the organization can take steps to prioritize these gaps using threat intelligence on what attackers are targeting, exploitability, business context, potential compensating controls and more.
For example, if the corporate monitoring infrastructure was previously siloed or included visibility gaps, then greater visibility may unveil new, significant vulnerabilities or other external/internal exposures.. But, there may be far too many vulnerabilities to remediate quickly. Eliminating silos and improving security visibility might also provide prioritization, ensuring a manageable amount of risks are left to be tackled
Safely Remediate
If an organization currently lacks metrics for its remediation process such as the mean time to remediation (MTTR) for critical vulnerabilities and exposures, now is a good time to create them. If metrics exist, the organization should review them in light of changes to its security monitoring architecture.
These metrics should be regularly audited and assessed. This helps to ensure that an organization’s exposure management program is meeting the needs of the business.
Organizations should focus remediation efforts on actions that measurably reduce exposure and shorten mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Before acting, teams should validate that a fix will meaningfully reduce risk, confirm whether compensating controls already exist, and ensure changes can be implemented safely in production environments. This approach helps prevent disruption while ensuring that the most dangerous exposures are addressed first.
Remediation must also be treated as a continuous process, not a onetime effort. Organizations should track MTTR on an ongoing basis and use it as a core metric for evaluating the effectiveness of their exposure management program.
Clear ownership, consistent tracking of remediation status, and regular measurement of progress help identify bottlenecks and gaps over time. By continuously monitoring MTTR and exposure reduction, security teams can improve prioritization, automate repeatable fixes, and demonstrate sustained risk reduction as both the environment and threat landscape evolve.
Benefits of Exposure Management
Exposure management is designed to take vulnerability management to the next level. Some benefits it can provide include the following:
- Greater Visibility: Exposure management is centered on achieving better visibility of an organization’s digital attack surface. This is invaluable for vulnerability detection and remediation but has other IT and security benefits as well.
- Reduced Risk: Exposure management optimizes risk management through increased visibility and automation. By closing more security gaps earlier, it reduces an organization’s risk of cyberattacks.
- Cost Savings: It’s always cheaper to prevent a cyberattack from happening than to remediate it after the fact. Effective exposure management can create security cost savings by closing security gaps before they can be exploited.
Choosing an Exposure Management Solution
Exposure management is designed to streamline and improve corporate risk management practices. By integrating security visibility and automating risk management where possible, an organization can more proactively protect itself against cyberattacks.
Check Point Exposure Management, now has 150+ integrations to ensure remediation is quick, safe and has wide coverage.
An effective exposure management program makes cybersecurity cheaper and more cost-effective. To learn more about how Check Point Exposure Management can help, sign up for a free demo today.
