Too many CISOs act like sailors when they should act like captains. They may not be the ones “bailing out water” themselves, but if their security strategy is reduced to a reactive one, they forfeit their chance to see farther—and to lead.
Reactive risk management is the MO of many CISOs today. Why? Because it’s hard enough to keep pace with evolving threats. No one wants to leave their enterprise exposed. And right now, it doesn’t seem like there’s a better option.
But the irony is that by simply reacting to the “next” emergency, companies may be failing to address the “best” emergency, or the one that has the greatest impact on the business. A reactive approach will never get you there—it doesn’t give you a big enough view.
For that, teams need exposure management. And this is a solution that any company can adopt.
Reactive Risk Management: Is a Proactive Strategy Attainable?
“But we’re drowning,” is the response from many CISOs when the topic of moving away from reactive security is brought up. Whoever introduces the topic seems wildly out of touch – “Yeah, I’d love to sit down and plan things out, but we’re just trying to not get breached here, and it’s taking all the resources we have.”
It’s a fair point.
The threat landscape has been evolving at a breakneck pace, thanks largely to AI. This has left most SOCs even further behind than they were when the pandemic pushed the issue of digital transformation, remote work, hybrid environments, and cloud workloads. Companies today are struggling just to keep up, with 62% of all SOC alerts being ignored.
The alternative is obviously a world in which CISOs can see beyond the day’s threats and plan out a thoughtful strategy that takes all threat vectors into account.
But that’s a luxury not all CISOs can afford. Or can they?
New Tech Has Put Forecasting Within Any CISO’s Reach
No longer does “seeing ahead” mean cobbling together a patchwork of network solutions and training your staff on multiple tools.
Security leaders can leverage new implementations of technology like unified exposure management platforms to move away from highly reactive risk management and toward well-communicated, predictable actions and outcomes.
This means a full view of your attack surface, all in one place.
What is an Exposure Management Platform?
An exposure management platform, or exposure assessment platform (EAP), is a single, comprehensive solution that gives organizations an overarching view of their attack surface and lets them know which risk presents the greatest threat to the business.
Exposure management in cybersecurity is a business-centric approach to risk reduction, not only telling teams which threats exist, but also which would cause the most damage if exposed. This gives CISOs the information they need to strategically reduce the attack surface, rather than throwing time and resources at fixes that may not be the number one problem.
Exposure management platforms either natively provide or integrate with discovery tools to scan the entire attack surface – cloud, IT, IoT, identities, and OT – so organizations get a constant view of possible exposures. This eliminates the blind spots that specialized, siloed security point solutions can introduce.
Gartner notes that EAPs “provide direction for mobilization, identifying the various teams involved in mitigation and remediation” and that they “prioritize treatment efforts for high-risk exposures by incorporating threat landscape, business, and existing security control context.” Gartner created the category for Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) in 2022.
Key Components of Exposure Management
Exposure management requires taking stock of your assets, discovering their weaknesses, identifying their impact should they be exploited, and then fixing the most pressing problems first.
As organizations increase their cyber maturity, they will transition from piecemeal solutions like vulnerability management (and even the more advanced risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM)) to this more comprehensive, business-centric approach. It encompasses:
- Asset identification: Find all digital assets an attacker could exploit (so, all of them). This includes APIs, endpoints, devices, DNS records, apps, databases, and cloud resources.
- Threat Surface Mapping: Find ways in which those assets can be exploited: vulnerabilities, open ports, misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and more.
- Risk Prioritization: Not all assets (or their risks) are created equal. Prioritize them based on the importance of the asset to the overall operations of the business if exposed.
- Execution: Begin remediating the most impactful security breaches first. This could mean reducing privileges, patching, amending configurations, or removing shadow data and devices. Then, continue with ongoing monitoring as these prioritized lists change with every new technology added to the business.
Opening Up Business Opportunities with Strategic Risk Management
This level of strategic risk management creates opportunities for security to support business like never before. Instead of cybersecurity goals existing in a vacuum, they can be evaluated in the context of bottom-line priorities.
Exposure management translates technical risk into business language, boosting buy-in among leadership. By looking at cyber risk in the same way as, say, financial exposure, stakeholders can be on the same page. This leads to better communication and decisions that are more aligned with common company goals, rather than pitting “security and progress” against each other as so often happens.
When board members see how security exposures across the attack surface will detrimentally impact business, the fight to get resources to solve the problem becomes one in which everybody is engaged.
Conclusion
Proactive exposure management secures an expanding attack surface. One that includes things like cloud apps, containerization, Kubernetes, hybrid applications, and distributed workforces.
Responding to attacks as they strike may keep companies afloat, but it gives attackers the advantage of surprise. To level up their security maturity – and impact on their organizations – CISOs need to eliminate this advantage.
And that means making the journey from reactive security to strategic risk management.
- The CISO’s Journey to Strategic Risk Management: Less Firefighting, More Forecasting - October 17, 2025
- Data Detection and Response: Enhancing Threat Intelligence and Incident Response - April 11, 2024
- Is an API Manager the Key to Securing Your APIs? - August 25, 2023
