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Each Monday, the Tenable Exposure Management Academy provides the practical, real-world guidance you need to shift from vulnerability management to exposure management. In this Exposure Management Academy FAQ, we help CISOs understand exposure management, look at how advanced you might be and outline how to structure a program. You can read the entire Exposure Management Academy series here.Since we started the Exposure Management Academy in March, we’ve received lots of questions. To provide answers, we launched an exposure management FAQ series in April and we’re following that with a few more questions and answers. Do you have a question about exposure management? If so, fill out the form at the bottom of this page and we’ll address your question in a future post.I’m a CISO. What should I know about exposure management?This is a fundamental question we hear from many CISOs. In short, exposure management offers CISOs a unified view of the most significant cyber exposures across their organization’s entire attack surface. Toxic combinations of preventable weaknesses — including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions — can lead to substantial business exposure if they’re exploited. To effectively practice exposure management, you need to be able to identify these toxic risk combinations that create attack paths leading to your most valuable assets or administrative privileges. Implementing an exposure management program can help you streamline prioritization and remediation efforts, making it easier for your security teams to be proactive about reducing your exploitable attack surface. Exposure management helps unify the data produced by disparate proactive security functions, including vulnerability management, web application scanning, cloud security, identity security, OT security and attack surface management.Ultimately, exposure management improves both security and business results. By delivering comprehensive visibility, a unified view of security data and enriched context regarding asset and identity interdependencies and potential impact, exposure management initiatives enhance productivity and efficiency while decreasing overall costs and exposure.Want to learn more? Browse the posts in the Exposure Management Academy archive. Every week, we release a new post that focuses on how you can make the most of exposure management.How do I know how advanced we are with exposure management?Exposure management includes a lot of things your security team is already doing, like vulnerability management, web application security and attack surface management. Based on the work we’ve done to help organizations implement exposure management, Tenable developed an exposure management maturity model that identifies five stages of exposure management maturity:Stage 1: Ad hocThis initial stage is characterized by tools and processes, with significant visibility gaps and reactive response..Stage 2: DefinedAt this stage, you have basic tools, processes and frameworks, with siloed visibility and response..Stage 3: StandardizedWith mature tools and processes, you’re beginning to unify data and add business context.Stage 4: AdvancedYou have unified visibility, with rich business context and some technical context.Stage 5: OptimizedYour organization has aligned views of exposure, with consistent metrics, reporting, prioritization and workflows.Which stage fits your current situation? If you’re in the early stages, you’re like most organizations. You can use our maturity assessment to see where you stand. If you’ve moved beyond the early stages, we’d love to hear from you — fill out the form below and tell us your story. How should I structure my exposure management program?These are the four fundamental components of exposure management:Strategy: Define the problems exposure management can help you solve and the objectives you want to achieve by implementing an exposure management program or platform. Consider the risks you’re trying to mitigate and the cyber threats that are most relevant to your organization. Then evaluate your team's current exposure management maturity (see above) and identify any gaps in capabilities you’ll need to fill.Visibility: You’ll need to enhance your ability to identify all preventable risks (i.e., vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions) and discover all assets, identities and applications across your entire attack surface, including cloud, OT, and IoT environments. A key here is using a central inventory to consolidate and standardize all asset and risk data.Insight: A consistent scoring methodology across all risk types and attack surfaces is a critical replacement for the disparate scoring you get with individual tools. You’ll enhance your exposure data with technical and business context so you can prioritize remediation based on the potential business impact of exploitation.Action: Defining necessary roles and allocating cross-functional resources is a central element of the exposure management journey. Here, you’ll integrate, streamline and activate processes and workflows that will help you identify, prioritize and remediate exposures. Plus, you’ll be able to optimize workflows and track program effectiveness through cross-domain analytics and reporting.Have a question about exposure management you’d like us to tackle?We’re all ears. Share your question and maybe we’ll feature it in a future post. 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Analysis Summary
# Best Practices: Exposure Management Program
## Overview
These practices focus on establishing a mature Exposure Management program designed to gain comprehensive visibility across the entire attack surface, accurately prioritize risks based on potential business impact, and implement standardized processes for remediation across all environments (cloud, OT, IoT).
## Key Recommendations
### Immediate Actions
1. **Establish Centralized Asset Inventory:** Immediately begin consolidating and standardizing asset data from all discovered sources into a central inventory system to achieve comprehensive visibility across the attack surface.
2. **Identify Preventable Risks:** Catalog all currently identified preventable risks, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions, across all known assets.
3. **Define Cross-Functional Roles:** Identify and allocate personnel from relevant teams (security, IT, operations) required to participate in the exposure management journey.
### Short-term Improvements (1-3 months)
1. **Implement Consistent Scoring:** Develop and implement a unified scoring methodology that applies consistently across all discovered risk types (vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, etc.) instead of relying on disparate, individual tool scores.
2. **Enrich Risk Data with Context:** Enhance technical risk findings by incorporating both technical context and crucial business context to accurately gauge the potential business impact of exploitation.
3. **Activate Prioritization Workflows:** Begin integrating and streamlining processes that use the enriched, context-aware data to prioritize remediation efforts based on defined business risk.
### Long-term Strategy (3+ months)
1. **Optimize Remediation Workflows:** Continuously evaluate and optimize existing security workflows to streamline the identification, prioritization, and remediation of exposures.
2. **Establish Cross-Domain Reporting:** Implement cross-domain analytics and reporting capabilities to effectively track the overall effectiveness and maturity of the security hygiene and exposure management program.
3. **Integrate Third-Party Data:** Ensure the exposure management platform seamlessly integrates data from existing third-party security tools using connectors to supplement native sensor data for a complete risk picture.
## Implementation Guidance
### For Small Organizations
- Prioritize achieving core visibility. Focus initial efforts on establishing a single, accurate inventory for on-premises and cloud assets.
- Adopt a simplified, consistent risk scoring mechanism immediately to avoid getting bogged down in complex prioritization metrics.
- Leverage free or low-cost initial scanning tools where possible, but plan for integration into a central platform to prevent data silos.
### For Medium Organizations
- Focus on integrating data feeds from existing specialized tools (e.g., cloud security posture management, vulnerability scanners) into a central exposure management platform.
- Begin formally defining roles and responsibilities across IT and Security required for executing joint remediation plans.
- Develop baseline reporting metrics that track remediation velocity against prioritized, business-contextualized risks.
### For Large Enterprises
- Mandate the use of continuous integration pipelines (e.g., CI/CD) to feed asset and configuration data directly into the central inventory system.
- Standardize identity exposure assessment alongside traditional vulnerability assessment to address excessive permissions across all environments (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management - CIEM).
- Focus heavily on optimizing complex, cross-departmental workflows and implementing rigorous governance based on cross-domain reporting results.
## Configuration Examples
*(The source material discusses platform capabilities and integrations rather than specific technical configurations like firewall rules or operating system settings. Therefore, specific configuration examples are generalized to the required integration points):*
| Component | Configuration Goal | Guidance |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Asset Inventory** | Data Normalization | Configure all asset discovery sources (scanners, cloud APIs, ITAM) to feed data into a central system using standardized naming conventions and classification tags. |
| **Risk Scoring** | Unified Prioritization | Ensure the platform is configured to weigh vulnerability severity (CVSS/EPSS) alongside asset criticality and exploitable paths (business context) to derive a single Exposure Score. |
| **Automation** | Just-in-Time (JIT) Access | Implement JIT access protocols, especially for cloud environments, ensuring standing privileges are minimized and temporary access is strictly time-bound and reviewed. |
## Compliance Alignment
The principles outlined align with recognizing and managing risks across the attack surface, which directly supports requirements from major frameworks:
- **NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF):** Primarily supports **Identify** (ID Asset Management) and **Detect** (ID Anomalous Activity) functions through comprehensive inventory and continuous monitoring required for context-aware scoring.
- **ISO/IEC 27001:** Supports **A.12 Operational Security,** ensuring systems are managed to identify and protect against security weaknesses.
- **CIS Controls (Critical Security Controls):** Strongly supports **Control 1: Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets** and **Control 3: Continuous Vulnerability Management.**
## Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- **Treating Risk in Silos:** Do not rely solely on scoring derived from individual tools (e.g., prioritizing only high-CVSS vulnerabilities without considering business context or asset criticality).
- **Failing to Define Ownership:** Avoiding the allocation of cross-functional resources, which results in remediation work slowing down or stopping when it requires handoffs between different operational teams.
- **Stale Asset Inventory:** Allowing the central inventory to become outdated or incomplete, leading to blind spots in cloud, OT, or IoT environments.
- **Ignoring Identity Exposure:** Focusing only on traditional vulnerabilities while overlooking excessive user or service account permissions ("Identity Exposure").
## Resources
- **Exposure Management Platform:** Solutions specializing in centralizing visibility across Cloud, Vulnerability, OT/IoT, and Identity Exposure (e.g., platforms consolidating CNAPP, CIEM, and VM).
- **Tenable One:** A platform mentioned for providing unified asset inventory, exposure analytics, and prioritization capabilities.
- **Cloud Security Tools:** Utilizing CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform) for cloud posture and vulnerability management.
- **Identity Governance:** Implementing CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) to manage excessive permissions.