7 Questions to Unmask “Single Agent” Exposure Management Money Pits

Many EDR vendors are retrofitting their tools and slapping an “exposure management” label on them. Don’t be fooled. These offerings often conceal unexpected costs and create dangerous blind spots. Use these seven questions to find an exposure management platform that delivers real value that scales.

Imagine buying a new car, only to realize the steering wheel and brakes are sold separately. Oh, and you have to hire a third-party mechanic to install them.

Absurd, right? Well, believe it or not, this is how some vendors are selling their exposure management “platforms” today.

We often see this with endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendors. Eager to jump on the exposure management bandwagon, they retrofit their EDR products, market a low base price, and promise a turnkey "single agent" miracle.

But when the ink dries, the reality sets in. That low base price you thought you were getting has escalated due to add-ons. You’re left with a premium price tag for a product that can’t see half your network.

The unexpected costs of single-agent exposure management solutions

Here’s the frustrating scenario of escalating costs and spiraling complexity that clients often face:

• Fragmented licensing and hidden add-on costs: The initial "single agent"-based price turns out to be wishful thinking. To get anything resembling true exposure management, you must purchase costly add-ons for securing containers, cloud workloads, operational technology (OT) systems, IoT devices, and other critical elements of modern, hybrid environments. When the dust settles, your per-seat cost has increased significantly.
• Inflexible, unpredictable licensing models: Some vendors use unpredictable credit-based "drawdown" models that make budgeting impossible and lead to unexpected costs mid-contract.
• High operational staff-related costs: Total cost of ownership (TCO) isn't limited to software licenses. You can incur significant operational costs as your staff wrestles with the shortcomings of these so-called exposure management platforms. Valuable time is wasted:
  • Chasing false positives and inaccurate data
  • Grappling with platform stability issues
  • Manually creating compliance and business-risk reports
  • Managing remediation due to poor platform workflows
• The financial hits of blind spots: Endpoint-centric exposure management platforms can miss a large percentage of vulnerabilities, especially on assets EDR agents can’t see, such as networking gear, cloud services, and OT systems. The financial impact of a single breach from one overlooked vulnerability could be massive.
• Hidden integration costs: These visibility gaps left by inadequate exposure management solutions inevitably require purchasing additional tools to ingest and integrate data from critical sources like identity logs. This adds cost and complexity, shattering the myth of the cost effectiveness of the "single agent" architecture.
   

“When we review our security investments, I want to ensure we consider total cost of ownership for our exposure management goals and any changes in our business risks. While the promise of a single agent solution can be enticing, the reality is that incomplete coverage increases enterprise risk, which increases the likelihood of a breach, and often requires additional investments to fill in visibility gaps.” 

— Matt Brown, Tenable CFO

Key capabilities of genuine exposure management platforms

To avoid the unexpected costs of a fragmented, endpoint-centric approach, you must first be clear on what a genuine, market-leading exposure management platform provides. Market research firms agree that the following capabilities are non-negotiable for exposure management platforms:

• Deep, comprehensive vulnerability and exposure data across all assets, including those in cloud workloads, network edge devices, AI platforms, OT/IoT environments, on-prem data centers, and more
• Transparent and precise exposure prioritization
• Guided remediation 

A true platform delivers a single, integrated workflow to manage the entire exposure lifecycle: from advanced vulnerability and exposure intelligence and AI-driven prioritization to patch management and response validation.

To provide a full and precise inventory of all of your assets and their exposures, it must use multiple detection methods, including active scanning, passive network scanning, and agent-based coverage. Equally important, it must provide rich, multidimensional context on how those assets relate to and impact each other.

It’s only when you have a single, unified view of all your assets and their security issues that you can reap exposure management’s core value: preemptive risk reduction.

We also invite you to explore our own exposure management maturity model, where you can get deeper details about the eight key criteria for assessing maturity, and the five maturity levels.

Now that you know what to look for in an exposure management platform, dig deeper and ask vendors these seven critical questions.

7 questions to avoid exposure management sticker shock 

1. What is your real TCO once all modules and integrations are included?

The initial per-asset price that EDR vendors quote you is often just a starting point. We’ve seen costs double once customers realize "optional" modules are actually mandatory, unless you want the “exposure management” platform to offer only partial security and compliance coverage of your hybrid environment. Then comes the expense and complexity of integrating third-party “add-on” modules into the core platform.

Ask them: Can you provide an all-in, per-asset price that includes every module needed for comprehensive exposure management without any hidden dependencies or unforeseen add-ons — such as a separate EDR license — and without requiring costly and complex integrations?

2. How does your licensing model support budget predictability?

Don't let a vendor talk you into credit pools that evaporate swiftly. Credit-based drawdown models will obscure your budget forecasts, opening the door for unexpected and significant expenses.

Look for a vendor that offers everything you need for a unified, full-featured exposure management platform, with a predictable licensing model. 

Also, since your attack surface changes more than once a year, look for a platform that gives you flexibility to shift licenses among the platform's different components every quarter. Some vendors only allow you to do this once per year.

Ask them: How do you ensure we can start small, scale gradually, and keep our annual costs predictable without blowing through a credit pool? Since our attack surface changes during the year, do you allow us to shift licenses between your platform’s modules to match our evolving cyber risks at least quarterly?

3. Can you prove the completeness and accuracy of your exposure data?

Endpoint-focused platforms that rely on a “single agent” inevitably can’t scan the full attack surface of a modern, hybrid environment that includes legacy servers, OT systems, cloud workloads, AI tools, IoT devices, web apps, and network infrastructure.

Even when these platforms include network scanning capabilities for asset discovery and vulnerability assessment, the scanner relies on the “single agent.” This limits the scanner’s coverage reach to the network segment where the “single agent” is deployed. These agent-dependent scanners also often perform poorly in complex enterprise environments.

As a result, these exposure management platforms flag many false positives while they fail to detect known CVEs and other critical exposures, including SQL flaws, weak ciphers, and more. 

Another byproduct of their limitations: They can’t capture nuanced and rich risk context, and they can’t pinpoint toxic combinations, such as an asset that’s exposed to the internet, possesses excessive privileges, and has a critical vulnerability.

With a limited view of your attack surface, you’re at an elevated risk for cyber breaches and the sky-high expenses they cause due to: operational downtime, lost business, damaged brand reputation, lawsuits, regulatory fines, and more.

Put another way: The financial impact of a single breach from a missed vulnerability or an overlooked misconfiguration can dwarf the platform's cost.

Ask them: Can your platform provide a unified view and full coverage of our entire attack surface, including of assets that can’t be scanned by your single endpoint agent, and thus truly lower our cyber risk by managing all of our exposures across our entire hybrid environment? Can your platform pinpoint toxic combinations of risk?

4. How does this platform demonstrably reduce my team's workload?

Your team is already stretched thin. A tool that acts as a glorified spreadsheet creates work, instead of reducing it.

You need to factor in how much time and effort your team will need to invest manually filling in the blanks left by EDR-centric platforms’ coverage gaps.

Look for an exposure management platform that helps your staff resolve the riskiest threats with the least amount of effort. The platform should lighten your staff’s workload and reduce your operational expenses. 

Specifically, it must offer you robust reporting, pinpoint your most critical risks, and filter historical data by asset groups (e.g., "vulnerabilities fixed in the last 30 days for the finance department's servers.")

It should also help your staff via exposure-response workflows that automate task assignment, track compliance with service-level agreements, and verify remediation.

Ask them: Can your exposure management platform consolidate dozens of remediation tasks into a single, efficient action? How can it help us prioritize, not just catalogue, vulnerabilities? How many full-time employees do your typical customers dedicate simply to operating the tool versus addressing actual risk?

5. What is the true breadth of your compliance coverage?

Modern enterprises must adhere to multiple, complex compliance frameworks — industry standards, government regulations, internal policies, and more. Checking a box against a single benchmark doesn't cut it in the enterprise. You need a tool that helps you streamline your compliance and document it.

Compliance violations can cost you dearly in the form of government fines and penalties, legal liabilities, and lost business.

Ask them: How does your platform meet our enterprise compliance needs across multiple frameworks, and how does it help us report on them?

6. How do you communicate business value and context to leadership?

The C-suite and the board of directors don't care about granular CVE counts. They’re focused on business risk and peer comparison. They need to understand the impact of your organization’s security posture on the business. They need to know if and how the organization is effectively reducing cyber risk, and how it compares in this respect to its peers. 

If you have to manually build that context, your exposure management platform is failing you.

Having these insights is critical so that the organization can make informed, effective decisions with regards to cyber investments and security and compliance strategies. 

Ask them: How can your platform help us benchmark our security posture against industry peers and provide clear, business-centric context for our security investments?

7. How open is your partner ecosystem?

The adoption of new technologies like cloud, AI, containers, and smart devices has led organizations to acquire specialized security tools for each of them. Thus, exposure management platforms must provide a comprehensive and unified approach to integrate and aggregate data from these point security tools into a single exposure data fabric. 

With these integrations, platforms can establish a single source of truth to enable complete visibility into assets and their exposures across the entire attack surface, providing full risk context into asset relationships and viable attack paths, and maximizing return on investment in tools the organization already owns.

Look for an exposure management platform with an open ecosystem that supports the broadest number of security tools. It’s even better if the platform also provides an open framework that lets it ingest data from virtually any homegrown, custom, or specialized point solution with just a few clicks. 

Ask them: How many technology providers do you partner with? How many third-party tool integrations does your exposure management platform have? How do security tool integrations enrich platform capabilities regarding prioritization, risk scoring, and unified remediation workflows?

True value that scales

As an organization scales and its attack surface expands, the "single agent" solution quickly starts to buckle. Scaling it requires additional spend, often without a proportional reduction in risk as costs spiral out of control.

Don’t put your organization in this precarious position.

True enterprise-grade exposure management shouldn't come with hidden surprises. It should scale with you, not against you. It requires a unified platform that delivers broad visibility, intelligent prioritization, and streamlined mobilization. 

When evaluating solutions, look for unified, transparent licensing, comprehensive compliance coverage, and a robust partner ecosystem, all in one place.

Don't let the deceiving simplicity of a "single agent" pitch lock you into a costly and incomplete solution. 

True exposure management provides a unified, comprehensive platform that delivers measurable value and predictable costs as you scale.

Learn more:

• Tenable is named a Leader in the First-Ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms
• View the on-demand webinar “Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive”
• See the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform in action
• Explore the Tenable Exposure Management Maturity Model and Self-Assessment