How exposure management provides the foundation for preventive security

Every day, security practitioners face a common challenge: As IT environments become more distributed and grow in complexity, safeguarding them becomes more difficult. In response, organisations resort to adopting myriad point solutions to assess multiple types of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in their IT assets. According to a 2023 Forrester Consulting survey, more than two-thirds of respondents in India (67%) have used 10 or more preventive cybersecurity tools in the past 12-24 months.

But this security “tool sprawl” quickly becomes counterproductive. With so many technologies in play, security teams end up struggling to keep track of all the data from each solution, which ends up on unwieldy spreadsheets. In fact, the same Forrester survey commissioned by Tenable indicated that 46% of Indian organisations use multi-tabbed spreadsheets to analyse cyber risk. It's no wonder security leaders perceive preventive security as a daunting challenge, as it necessitates comprehensive visibility into all assets, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Furthermore, it demands the ability to predict and prioritise threats for mitigation, all while providing a centralised, easily communicable view of cyber risk.

When there are so many products in use, it’s hard to monitor each one and determine at any given point whether the overall organisational risk has been reduced. Preventive security is possible with a comprehensive exposure management program. Exposure management is designed to streamline and improve corporate risk management practices as it integrates security visibility and automates risk management where possible, allowing organisations to proactively protect themselves against threats.

Addressing the ‘visibility’ conundrum

Having a full, continuously updated and detailed understanding of all IT assets and their vulnerabilities and misconfigurations is the holy grail for security teams. To reach this objective, organisations must grasp what “visibility” truly entails, recognising that it extends beyond merely identifying existing threats and involves understanding which challenges demand prioritised attention.

The crux of the matter revolves around two critical aspects that often go unaddressed: Are organisations seeking to identify all assets, or just those they are already aware of? Do they possess a comprehensive understanding of asset context in correlation with security findings and their impact on the organisation?

These fundamental aspects are frequently overlooked, as many organisations initially focus on identifying assets related to conventional IT devices like servers, workstations, and network infrastructure while neglecting web applications, ICS/SCADA/IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, containers, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) configurations, Active Directory, and internet-facing assets. Though identifying all these assets is undoubtedly a formidable and time-consuming task, they remain of paramount importance to most businesses. They are susceptible to cyberattacks and, if compromised, can severely affect the organisation's financial health and reputation.

Achieving comprehensive visibility of all assets and their exposures is feasible with the appropriate exposure management solutions. Exposure management integrates data from various assessment tools and techniques, enabling the analysis of relationships between each discovery. This empowers organisations to gain a profound understanding of their vulnerabilities and pinpoint areas where they may be susceptible to cyberattacks.

Deriving context that matters

Once an organisation achieves full visibility, it typically confronts a daunting array of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, often numbering in the hundreds if not thousands. There’s not enough time and resources to address each of these security flaws. How can you pinpoint the security gaps that need immediate attention? Exposure management makes this possible, as it simplifies this process by offering organisations context into findings. Since attackers will commonly pivot from one type of vulnerability to another, defenders must comprehend how the collected data on vulnerabilities and misconfigurations interrelate.

Historically, such aggregated, relationship-focused analysis was carried out manually, necessitating security teams to establish their own risk relationships and leverage their personal understanding of the infrastructure. But this often led to incomplete views of the environment.

Exposure management automates this process by amalgamating data about configuration issues, vulnerabilities and attack paths across assets and technologies — including identity solutions; cloud configurations and deployments; and web applications.

Such visibility and valuable context make preventive security attainable. Armed with the right context, security teams can effectively communicate risk with other business-critical functions, and CISOs can effectively communicate risk to the board. It gives security teams the capability to prioritise which threats to combat first, helping them make better decisions.

Security practitioners often grapple with the challenge of comprehending risks within their environments and making informed choices regarding what to mitigate first. Given the abundance of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, accurately assessing risk is nearly impossible without suitable solutions to streamline the process.

Understanding the context behind assets and their security issues is pivotal. It constitutes a crucial step in correlating various risk elements and determining where the organisation faces the highest risk, the degree of risk exposure and the necessary mitigation actions. For organisations aiming to address these pressing concerns effectively, exposure management emerges as the ideal solution.

Kartik Shahani

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Kartik Shahani is Country Manager at Tenable India.