What is exposure management in the cloud?

Exposure management in the cloud finds exploitable chains across misconfigured assets, over-permissioned identities and accessible data. It helps your team shift from addressing individual cloud vulnerabilities to remediating real attack paths.

While a vulnerability scan might flag a risky open port or identity with broad permissions, it won’t show how an attacker could use both together. Attackers don’t just target cloud misconfigurations in isolation. They link exposures across your cloud environment and move through assets, identities and data until they reach something valuable. 

Cloud exposure management gives you visibility to detect those pathways and context to break them before threat actors exploit them. Traditional tools show you your vulnerabilities. Exposure management shows you how those cyber risks connect and reveals how services, permissions and network exposure combine into toxic combinations that increase your risk.

The Tenable Cloud Risk Report 2025 found that while organizations are improving, 29% of cloud workloads still present a toxic cloud trilogy, meaning they have public exposures that are critically vulnerable and highly privileged. This level of context is critical to effective cloud risk management.

Cloud environments generate thousands of security alerts every day. Many flag valid risks, like open storage buckets, broad identity and access management (IAM) roles and unencrypted resources, but they arrive with no sense of priority.

Exposure management helps your team focus on the alerts that matter. It filters alerts through a lens of impact, surfacing the combinations that could lead to actual compromise. It makes remediation faster and more defensible.

Instead of fixing everything, you fix what attackers can exploit and what would likely have the greatest impact on your critical systems and assets.

Toxic combinations are overlapping exposures that enable attackers to move laterally or escalate access. These include things like:

• A public-facing compute instance with a role that grants write access to sensitive S3 buckets
• A serverless function that invokes with overly broad permissions and communicates with internal APIs
• A container running with root access, exposed through an open port, tied to unscanned production data
• A CI/CD pipeline with unscoped credentials and permission to deploy to live environments

Exposure management surfaces these chains, helping you prioritize and remediate them as connected risks, not isolated issues.

Tenable correlates posture, identity and network data across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. It automatically maps:

• Who can access what
• Which assets have external exposures
• Which identities can access sensitive data
• How a compromise in one area could lead to lateral movement in another

This approach strengthens your entire cloud security strategy. Whether you’re focusing on minimizing blast radius or maintaining audit readiness, exposure management makes your decisions smarter.

Without exposure management, your team sees scattered alerts, but lacks insight into how they connect. That leads to firefighting and wasted effort.

When you understand exposure paths, you get strategic control. You see how to break a chain of risk with a single fix. You see where your compliance controls actually work and where they fall short.

Exposure management aligns with business goals, too. It reduces alert fatigue, speeds up audits and helps your security teams explain their priorities to engineering and leadership.

Exposure management strengthens every layer of your cloud security architecture:

• Cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools monitor for configuration drift.
• Cloud identity and entitlements management (CIEM) reveals identity relationships and over-permissioned accounts.
• Cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) combines those views with runtime protection and vulnerability scanning.

Exposure management connects them all. It adds risk-based prioritization across your controls and feeds into continuous improvement loops.

If you’re running a CNAPP and still drowning in tickets, exposure management can show you which alerts matter and which don’t.

Auditors don’t just want to know you have controls in place. They want to see how those controls reduce risk. Exposure management delivers that evidence.

It maps how least privilege enforcement protects sensitive data. It shows how segmentation isolates workloads. And, it visualizes how you scope identity access to prevent lateral movement.

This clarity supports security and compliance frameworks for real-time visibility and audit-ready reporting.

An Azure Function uses a managed identity with Contributor role access to an entire resource group. A public HTTP trigger exposes it.

If attackers discover that function, they can invoke it and use its identity to access databases, modify configurations or escalate privileges.

A vulnerability scanner might not catch this, but exposure management will.

Don't let complex cloud environments hide your biggest risks. Exposure management provides the critical context you need to reveal and remediate toxic combinations, turning reactive security into a proactive defense.

Ready to learn more about toxic cloud trilogies and how exposure management can help you better secure your cloud? Check out our blog on hybrid attack paths.