Understanding and Managing Cyber Risk: An Exposure Management FAQ for Business Leaders

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 post, we answer some questions we’ve gotten recently about the best way to determine, understand and communicate your risks. You can read the entire Exposure Management Academy series here.

The Exposure Management Academy receives lots of questions from readers — some who are already running an exposure management program and some who are considering it. In previous FAQs, we’ve dealt with a number of topics that are top-of-mind for security leaders and practitioners. 

This time, we thought we’d focus on questions around what you need to launch a unified security program with an exposure management approach.

How do I start getting a clear picture of all my cyber risks? My data is everywhere!

You’re not alone in asking this question. It’s a common challenge for organizations just starting with exposure management. You’ve probably built your IT environment over years, if not decades, and it includes a wide array of platforms. Maybe you have on-premises infrastructure, a bunch of cloud environments, containerized applications, web applications and operational technology. 

It’s a near certainty that each of those elements of your infrastructure has squirreled away insights about your overall cyber vulnerabilities. And because they’re not connected, you can’t assess that information in the context of your overall cybersecurity program. Aggregating and normalizing that data is a critical first step. 

A good exposure management platform will help you set up connectors — think of them as bridges between the various elements of your infrastructure — to pull raw data into a unified view.

Collecting the data is essential. Normalizing that data makes it all worthwhile. 

Normalization transforms raw, inconsistent data into a common, standardized format. Standardization ensures that you can consistently understand, compare and analyze all data regardless of its original source. 

Without this fundamental step you’d still operate with significant blind spots and it’s unlikely you’d ever get a complete and accurate assessment of your entire attack surface. So your true risk posture would remain a mystery. 

Once we have our data centralized, how do we determine the risks that are truly material to our business operations?

This is the logical follow-up question after you pull everything together. Although comprehensive data is invaluable, the sheer volume can be a bit overwhelming. Addressing every identified risk simultaneously is next to impossible. So, you’ll want to establish a method for prioritizing your efforts. Your exposure management policy is a key ingredient in pulling this off.

This policy should extend beyond just identifying every vulnerability. A policy’s main focus should be on figuring out which vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security issues genuinely pose a substantial risk to your business objectives. When you have a well-defined policy, you know that your prioritization aligns with your organization's unique strategic goals and appetite for risk tolerance.

A critical component of this stage of exposure management is applying and creating what we call Exposure Signals in the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform. Exposure Signals are more sophisticated than generic vulnerability scores. They’re actionable indicators derived from your aggregated data that specifically highlight high-impact risks within your environment. 

For example, an effective Exposure Signal might indicate: This critical vulnerability on a business-critical server is not only publicly accessible but also has a known, actively exploited threat associated with it right now.

This kind of signal immediately elevates the priority of that issue. By meticulously defining clear policies and identifying these precise signals, your organization can transition from a reactive "patch everything" approach to a more strategic, risk-based methodology. This enables you to focus valuable resources on issues that have the greatest impact on your organization’s overall exposure.

How can we present our cybersecurity posture to executives in a way that is relevant and actionable for them?

Communication is a common challenge. Cybersecurity is no longer solely a technology function. Ask a C-level executive or board member and they’ll tell you it’s a fundamental business imperative. But do they understand the lingo and data minutiae? Probably not. 

So, to secure the necessary buy-in and resources, your cybersecurity initiatives must clearly demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes, including key cyber risk quantification metrics like revenue protection, compliance adherence and reduction of business risk.

The key to effective communication is to align yourself with the business dashboards and KPIs executives rely on. An effective method for achieving this alignment is to use tagging to create custom exposure cards. 

Tagging is a powerful feature in Tenable One that enables you to categorize and label your assets, vulnerabilities and exposures based on specific business context. Maybe you could tag assets by their responsible business unit (such as finance or operations), their business criticality (mission-critical or supporting system), specific compliance requirements (General Data Protection Regulation or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) or even their geographical location.

These tags will help you construct your custom Exposure Cards, which offer tailored, easily understandable real-time views within your dashboards that a senior executive could access to get a summary of overall risk reduction across critical business lines. 

An application owner, with deeper technical understanding, might access a card that details the exposures directly relevant to their applications or services. 

Customized, business-centric reporting ensures that all stakeholders, from the executive suite to operational teams, have a clear view into the most relevant exposures. This approach significantly improves decision-making and ensures allocation of resources to areas in need. 

Learn more

• Check out the Tenable exposure management resource center to discover the value of exposure management and explore resources to help you stand up a continuous threat exposure management program.