Refreshed and updated September 10th, 2025.
In today’s rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, exposure management has become a critical practice for organizations looking to stay ahead of potential threats. In fact, according to Brinqa’s 2025 State of Exposure Management Study that surveys 200+ cybersecurity professionals, 93% of leaders now view exposure management as a top business priority. Unlike traditional approaches that focus solely on vulnerabilities, exposure management examines the broader context of how and why specific issues could impact an organization and prioritizes actions based on risk. A key aspect of this practice is understanding the exposure of employees, contractors, and even executives as attackers often attempt to exploit human vulnerabilities as well as critical systems.
What Is Exposure Management?
Exposure management is the process of identifying and prioritizing security risks associated with a given organization’s assets. These assets can be anything from endpoints and applications to users and hardware-each with unique properties that an attacker may attempt to exploit.
By gaining an understanding of these assets and their vulnerabilities, organizations can better manage their attack surface, which makes up all of the potential entry points that a threat actor may leverage to gain access to a network. Without proper controls in place, this attack surface can increase an organizations risk posture.
Exposure Management vs Vulnerability Management
While the goals of exposure management and vulnerability management are to reduce risk, exposure management can be seen as the evolutionary steps from vulnerability management as it takes a more comprehensive approach. Here’s a brief comparison of the two:
- Vulnerability Management: Focuses specifically on vulnerabilities (CVE’s) that are discovered by scanning applications and systems. Oftentimes the results from a vulnerability scan must be manually combined with data from multiple tools in order to prioritize remediation efforts.
- Exposure Management: Considers both CVEs and non-CVEs, as well as data from other sources such as misconfigurations, threats identified in other security tools, and threat intelligence. It frames these risks in terms of business impact, such as remediation costs or the overall risk posed to an organization. Additionally, it accounts for risks tied to human behaviors, such as poor password hygiene or susceptibility to phishing attacks, ensuring organizations can better protect both their systems and their people.
The 4 Key Components of Exposure Management
Effective exposure management leverages existing tools in an organization’s security stack to asses and quantify risks. The lifecycle of exposure management consists of four key components:
Benefits of Exposure Management
Organizations that adopt proactive exposure management typically see numerous benefits, including:
- Prioritized Risk Reduction. Focus on the most critical exposure, ensuring that the highest risks are addressed first.
- Enhance Security Posture. Shift from reactive responses to proactive identification and resolution of risks.
- Improved Efficiency. Streamline processes, enabling teams to focus on what is most critical.
- Compliance Alignment. Simplify the identification and reporting of compliance gaps to meet any regulatory requirements.
Key Takeaways On Exposure Management
Adopting exposure management practices empowers organizations to move beyond reacting to threats and ensure that they remain resilient in the face of an evolving threat landscape. By prioritizing actionable changes and automating processes, teams can efficiently reduce risk and increase their security posture.
While implementing exposure management may seem challenging initially, automating data collection and prioritization can ease the transition. This methodical approach helps organizations protect their assets, align the business on compliance needs and proactively address emerging risks across their attack surface.
More About Reach Security
Reach Security is the first platform that bridges the gap between knowing your exposure and actually fixing it. Security teams are overwhelmed by exposures from misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and tool sprawl. Most solutions stop at reporting—Reach operationalizes remediation.
With Reach, organizations can:
