Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs)

What are Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs)?

An Exposure Assessment Platform (EAP) is a cybersecurity solution designed to identify, assess, and prioritize security exposures such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks across an organization’s IT infrastructure. EAPs merge both Vulnerability Assessment (VA) and Vulnerability Prioritization Technology (VPT), offering a unified approach to improving operational security.

How Do Exposure Assessment Platforms Work?

EAPs continuously monitor and evaluate an organization’s assets, such as on-premise systems, cloud environments, and third-party services, to identify potential vulnerabilities. They integrate discovery and assessment tools to provide comprehensive visibility into security gaps and utilize contextual data, such as asset criticality and threat intelligence, to prioritize remediation efforts.

Key Features of Exposure Assessment Platforms

• Comprehensive Asset Coverage: EAPs scan across multiple environments—on-premise, cloud, and third-party systems—ensuring continuous visibility of the entire attack surface.
• Contextual Risk Prioritization: They go beyond CVSS scores by factoring in business context, threat intelligence, and asset criticality to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their actual risk to the organization. By leveraging EAPs in conjunction with Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), organizations can emulate true attacker tactics, safely testing the resilience of their production IT environments against real cyber-attacks without risking operational continuity. This ensures that vulnerabilities posing the highest risk are prioritized for immediate remediation.
• Centralized Reporting: EAPs offer centralized visibility and reporting, allowing security teams to focus on urgent risks and streamline the remediation process.

Benefits of Exposure Assessment Platforms

• Proactive Cyber Risk Management: EAPs help organizations move beyond compliance and checklist-based vulnerability management to a proactive, risk-driven approach. They enable security teams to focus on real, exploitable vulnerabilities.
• Increased Efficiency: By centralizing data and providing actionable insights, EAPs enable organizations to improve operational efficiency, prioritize exposures that require immediate action, reduce response times, and prevent security breaches.
• Targeted Mitigation: EAPs don’t just focus on theoretical risks but on discovering new vulnerabilities that are actively exploitable and pose a significant threat to business operations.

Exposure Assessment Platforms in the 2024 Gartner® Hype Cycle™

The 2024 Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations highlights EAPs as a high-benefit category that has consolidated the functionalities of traditional AVs and VPTs. Gartner emphasizes that EAPs help organizations prioritize vulnerabilities by their real-world impact and address the most critical security gaps efficiently.

EAPs also play a pivotal role in the broader Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, supporting its five key phases: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. By integrating EAPs into the CTEM process, organizations can proactively manage their entire attack surface and continuously validate their security posture.

Going Beyond CVSS Scores

While CVSS scores offer a starting point for understanding vulnerability severity, they don’t provide the context needed to make informed security decisions. EAPs integrate threat intelligence, asset criticality, and business context to help organizations prioritize vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to critical business assets. This enables security teams to focus on vulnerabilities that could cause the most damage, rather than simply addressing low-priority issues.