Guide

How to chart a path to exposure management maturity

Ready to make exposure management a priority? This quick-start guide will help you pinpoint your current state of exposure management maturity and provide you with powerful people, process and technology changes to help you reach your desired state.

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How to Chart a Path to Exposure Management Maturity

14 powerful people, process and technology changes to drive measurable cybersecurity and risk management results

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What is exposure management?

Exposure management is a strategic approach to proactive security designed to continuously identify, prioritize and close an organization’s most urgent cyber exposures — those toxic combinations of preventable risks (e.g., vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions) that provide threat actors with a path to an organization’s most critical assets.

Benefits of exposure management

6 reasons CISOs make exposure management a cornerstone of their cybersecurity strategy

Exposure management helps to increase the productivity and efficiency of the cybersecurity function, while reducing overall costs and exposures.
It gives security and business leaders a unified view of their organization’s true cyber exposure.
It improves proactive security and remediation teams’ efficiency and effectiveness by prioritizing exposures and facilitating a single, unified process for remediating them.
It helps to shrink an organization’s exploitable attack surface, which reduces the burden on reactive security teams (e.g., incident responders, SOC analysts, threat hunters).
Exposure management provides security leaders with a mechanism for unifying siloed proactive security functions and the data their disparate tools produce.
It provides a scalable, sustainable path for raising the maturity levels of proactive security teams.

Exposure management proof points

Tenable customers have achieved the following outcomes with exposure management:

10X

Up to 10X improvement in asset visibility

75%

Up to 75% reduction in time spent aggregating and normalizing exposure data

82%

Up to 82% reduction in new remediation tickets

80%

Up to 80% reduction in licensing costs

$45M

$45 million reduction in cyber exposure in one year

The five stages of exposure management maturity

Stage 1: Ad-Hoc

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Relies largely on manual audits to identify assets in its environment.
Is more reactive than proactive, with limited or no tools in place to detect risk for each security domain.
Has not adopted any frameworks or benchmarks.
Lacks defined remediation workflows.
Relies on fragmented, inconsistent and manual tracking of metrics.

Stage 2: Defined

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Has staff with defined roles aligned to individual security domains, even if the maturity of each domain varies (e.g., some teams have more advanced expertise and processes).
Has better asset and attack surface visibility, but large gaps in coverage may remain due to intermittent use of automated discovery tools across some security domains.
Uses tool-specific or industry-standard risk scoring and has begun factoring threat intelligence into that scoring to help prioritize individual findings.
Has some remediation tools in place and has taken initial steps to define basic remediation processes.
Has taken initial steps to define a base set of metrics and reporting for each domain, but lacks business alignment and consistency across domains.

Stage 3: Standardized

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Has automated visibility into a broad cross-section of asset types across its attack surface, with risk detection focused primarily on vulnerabilities (CVEs).
Layers threat intelligence and asset criticality on top of tool-specific or industry-standard risk scoring to understand the probability of an exploit and the business value of an asset.
Aggregates some asset and risk data into a single data store, whether a database, reporting tool or unified data lake.
Has mature prioritization processes across individual security domains, along with well-documented remediation processes integrated into tools.
Has baseline metrics and reporting defined for each security domain, with the ability to tailor them for business units.

Stage 4: Advanced

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Has a robust, unified view of most assets across its attack surface. However, some visibility gaps may remain due to a reliance on point-in-time automated discovery.
️Has robust capabilities for detecting vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across the attack surface but typically lacks visibility into exposures from excessive human and machine permissions.
Normalizes risk scoring across domains and factors in threat intelligence and asset criticality.
Automatically aggregates, deduplicates and correlates security data into a unified data lake.
Has a unified approach to prioritization across domains that includes tagging with business context to understand potential business impact.
Dedicates and assigns staff to cross domain roles and uses existing, mature processes to mobilize remediation.
Has consistent metrics and reporting aligned to the business across domains.

Stage 5: Optimized

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Has a robust, unified view of its end-to-end attack surface with continuous discovery of assets.
Proactively detects all preventable forms of risk that attackers can exploit: vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions.
Has advanced, exposure-centric scoring that can determine total asset exposure, as well as exposure scores for different business units.
Takes action based on a prioritized view of the attack paths and exposures threat actors can exploit to breach critical assets and cause disruption.
Has a dedicated, mature, cross-domain team in place that is continuously optimizing processes and remediation workflows to drive maximum productivity and risk reduction.
Consistently measures and reports on true exposures rather than just individual risks.

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Related resources

Self-assessment tool

How to chart a path to exposure management maturity

How to Chart a Path to Exposure Management Maturity

What is exposure management?

Benefits of exposure management

6 reasons CISOs make exposure management a cornerstone of their cybersecurity strategy

Exposure management proof points

Tenable customers have achieved the following outcomes with exposure management:

The five stages of exposure management maturity

Stage 1: Ad-Hoc

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Stage 2: Defined

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Stage 3: Standardized

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Stage 4: Advanced

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Stage 5: Optimized

You know you’re at this stage if your organization:

Ready to get started?

Related resources

Exposure management maturity assessment

Security leaders’ guide to exposure management strategy

Exposure management is the future of proactive security

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