Cyber Exposure Management
Cyber exposure management is the process of identifying, understanding and mitigating risk across your digital ecosystem. This enables security teams to protect critical business assets, reduce risk and drive value for the organization. Exposure is the total collection of vulnerabilities and risks connected to your networks, systems and data – from malware and ransomware attacks to phishing, data breaches and more.
It’s impossible to prevent all threats but getting a full view of your cyber exposure management grants visibility to where you’re vulnerable, how those vulnerabilities may be exploited and what actions you need to take to safeguard your most valuable data. A holistic approach to cybersecurity that’s built on the foundations of risk-based vulnerability management, exposure management combines technical and business context to more accurately identify, communicate and mitigate cyber risk, so you can make better business decisions.
In today’s dynamic and increasingly complex IT environment, gaining comprehensive visibility into your modern attack surface has never been more important for cybersecurity teams to efficiently identify, prioritize and mitigate cyber risk. By 2026, organizations that implement continuous threat exposure management programs will be three times less likely to suffer a cybersecurity breach than those who don’t.
Cyber Exposure Management – A Holistic Approach to Cybersecurity
This is because, while traditional security defenses and threat hunting efforts focus on the immediate threat landscape, risk hunting goes beyond to proactively evaluate business and technical risk across business systems, prioritize protective actions and close attack paths before they are exploited. The result is a stronger defense against the most common and sophisticated threats, with greater visibility and intelligence into your entire network and systems.
Investing in a security analytics solution that can proactively and continuously identify areas of disproportionate risk is essential for protecting against the most advanced attackers, including worms, viruses, Trojans, phishing, malware and more. Solutions that automatically and proactively identify vulnerable or at-risk systems across the enterprise, in the cloud, shadow IT, across geographies and on mobile devices provide security teams with the necessary intelligence to effectively tackle those vulnerabilities before they become a problem.
Use our Cyber Risk Tool to estimate the value of your organisation’s data and understand your level of exposure against cyberattacks. Cyber risk is the financial and reputational impact of a cyber incident on an organisation, typically due to loss of customer or client information or a regulatory or compliance issue. It can affect a company’s ability to operate, its reputation or its bottom line.
It is often a difficult area for an organisation to manage, as it requires people from different domains to work together to assess, remediate and respond to a cyber threat event. This includes legal, internal and external communications; subject matter experts; end-user awareness and escalation teams and a crisis management team.
It’s also important to ensure that your cyber risk budget is properly aligned to the level of actual threat or risk that your organisation faces and how that translates to a potential financial loss. Using quantitative metrics is an effective way to do this, as they help identify the likely impact of a cyber event and how much risk reduction can be achieved.