Cyber Risk Exposure Management can help you with identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating threats.
Exposure Management is an emerging approach to cybersecurity that helps organisations continuously identify, assess, and address risk across their attack surface.
Its purpose is to provide security teams and business leaders with clear visibility into the assets, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures that adversaries can target — and prioritise actions to reduce those risks.
Gartner has helped popularise the concept through its reports on Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). The term is now being adopted across the industry as organisations seek to move beyond traditional vulnerability management and gain a more complete, continuous understanding of their cyber risk.
In this article, we explore what exposure management involves, why it is needed, how it works, and how it fits in different industries and cybersecurity initiatives.
Today’s digital environments are constantly expanding, leaving more openings for cyber attacks with every complex connection. From remote endpoints and cloud workloads to third-party applications and shadow IT, the attack surface is in perpetual flux.
Cyber exposure management is especially crucial for the many organisations that continue to use traditional security tools, which often operate in silos or rely on periodic scans. This approach leaves organisations vulnerable to blind spots and slow remediation.
For organisations navigating hybrid infrastructures and expanding digital ecosystems, visibility is foundational to avoid costly data breaches. According to Gartner, by 2026, organisations that prioritise exposure management will reduce breaches by 90% compared to those that don’t.
Overall, continuous monitoring of exposure is essential for:
Maintaining full visibility over all connected assets
Identifying exploitable vulnerabilities before attackers do
Prioritising the threats that matter most
Accelerating response to reduce breach likelihood
Exposure Management is best understood as an ongoing lifecycle comprising five core phases:
Organisations first need to establish complete visibility over all digital assets — including known and unknown assets, cloud resources, IoT devices, third-party systems, and shadow IT.
Automated discovery tools help map the full attack surface and identify exposed services, misconfigurations, and vulnerable assets.
Next, exposures are analysed and prioritised based on risk. This includes evaluating:
Exploitability of vulnerabilities
Business criticality of affected assets
Potential attack paths
Threat intelligence and adversary behaviours
This risk-based prioritisation ensures security teams focus efforts on addressing exposures that matter most.
Security teams then coordinate with IT and DevOps teams to remediate priority exposures — through patching, configuration changes, or other mitigations.
Remediation orchestration is a key part of effective Exposure Management, enabling faster, more coordinated risk reduction across environments.
Once remediation actions are taken, continuous validation confirms whether exposures have been effectively addressed — helping close the loop and prevent recurrence.
Finally, Exposure Management requires continuous monitoring. New assets, configurations, and vulnerabilities appear constantly — so Exposure Management must operate as an ongoing, iterative process.
Implementing exposure management offers several tangible benefits:
Improved Visibility: Consolidated view of the entire attack surface
Smarter Prioritisation: Contextual analysis helps reduce alert fatigue
Faster Remediation: Clear actionability accelerates MTTR (mean time to respond)
Operational Efficiency: Enables security and IT teams to align and reduce friction
Better Resilience: Fewer exploitable assets leads to a lower likelihood of breach
Executive Alignment: Exposure metrics can support board-level reporting
By identifying and reducing high-risk exposures, security teams can break attack chains before they lead to compromise.
Exposure refers to any digital asset or entry point that could be discovered, accessed, or exploited by an attacker. In other words, your attack surface.
In a business setting, this includes anything that interacts with the internet or internal networks but isn’t fully protected. When these assets are misconfigured, outdated, unmonitored, or unknown to the security team, they create gaps that adversaries can exploit.
These exposure points are not static — they evolve daily as environments change, assets are added or moved, or new business applications come online. Managing them is a continuous process, not a one-off exercise.
Internet-facing servers and web applications
Unpatched software and known vulnerabilities
Misconfigured cloud storage (e.g., open S3 buckets)
Unsecured or forgotten APIs
Shadow IT and orphaned systems
Remote endpoints without EDR/XDR protection
Third-party software and supply chain connections
Exposed credentials or sensitive data in public repositories
Many of these exposures are not vulnerabilities in the traditional sense—they are often misconfigurations or oversights that arise from operational complexity.
Attack Surface Management (ASM) and exposure management are closely related—but distinct.
ASM: Focuses on discovering and mapping digital assets from an external perspective. Its goal is visibility.
Exposure Management: Goes further by assessing those assets for risk, prioritising remediation, validating fixes, and continuously monitoring for changes.
For example, ASM may find that an old development server is still publicly accessible. Exposure management would assess that server’s vulnerabilities, determine whether it contains sensitive data, and help orchestrate remediation.
In short: ASM tells you what is out there, while exposure management tells you what matters most and what to do about it.
Vulnerability Management and Exposure Management are complementary but distinct approaches to reducing cyber risk.
Vulnerability Management: Focuses on identifying, prioritising, and remediating known software vulnerabilities (CVEs) across IT assets.
Exposure Management: Takes a broader, more comprehensive view — helping organisations manage all types of exposures across their attack surface, not just software vulnerabilities.
In short: vulnerability management is a critical input to exposure management, but exposure management provides a wider lens on digital risk, helping organisations proactively address all potential exposures, not just known CVEs.
Exposure management is becoming a critical capability for organisations of all sizes — particularly those with:
Complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments (ex: retail)
Industries with high regulatory or data compliance requirements (healthcare, government)
Large and dynamic digital attack surfaces (ex: finance)
Mature cybersecurity programs pursuing Zero Trust principles
Limited security resources seeking to maximise impact
As adversaries continue to innovate and attack surfaces expand, exposure management provides a scalable and effective way to reduce risk — helping organisations stay ahead of threats.
Exposure management complements and enhances a wide range of cybersecurity initiatives:
Network Security — providing context for better firewall and segmentation policies
Identity and Access Management (IAM) — helping identify overprivileged accounts
Zero Trust Architecture — supporting continuous risk assessment
Cloud Security — helping secure dynamic cloud environments
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) — identifying exposures that could lead to data leakage
Integrating exposure management insights with these programs helps organisations drive more effective, risk-based security outcomes.
Trend Vision One™ offers a Cyber Risk and Exposure Management (CREM) solution that ensures organizations can go beyond just ASM to reduce their cyber risk footprint. CREM takes a revolutionary approach by combining key capabilities—like External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM), Vulnerability Management, and Security Posture Management—across cloud, data, identity, APIs, AI, compliance, and SaaS applications into one powerful, easy-to-use solution. It’s not just about managing threats—it’s about building true risk resilience.
Cyber Risk Exposure Management can help you with identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating threats.