Exposure Management

Exposure Management (EM) is a crucial aspect of modern business operations, particularly in an increasingly complex and interconnected global landscape. In this article, we present an overview of Exposure Management, its significance, and how it can benefit your organization.

What is Exposure Management?

Exposure management entails the holistic process of identifying and mitigating risks across an organization's digital footprint, which spans on-premises and cloud environments, data, networks, and beyond. Exposure Management aims to proactively mitigate these risks to safeguard the organization's assets, reputation, and long-term viability. More than just patching vulnerabilities, it involves a continuous cycle of assessing and addressing security risks, especially as new technologies, vendors, or company acquisitions emerge, thus ensuring that the entire digital attack surface is safeguarded against potential threats. It's a critical element in maintaining an organization's defense posture and minimizing the threat of security breaches through its digital assets.

How is this different from traditional Vulnerability Management?

Traditional approaches to cybersecurity and Vulnerability Management (VulM), often fall short in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape due to their periodic and often reactive nature. They tend to focus on known vulnerabilities and pre-established threat models, which can overlook emerging risks and the dynamic nature of cyber threats. To stay ahead, organizations must adopt a proactive and continuous Exposure Management strategy. This means not only continuously identifying and assessing vulnerabilities but also integrating threat intelligence, adapting to new technologies, and evolving with the organization’s changing digital footprint. This continuous, adaptive approach ensures that security strategies are as agile and resilient as the threats they aim to mitigate.

Why Exposure Management Matters:

Effective Exposure Management is critical for organizations for several reasons:

Risk Minimization: By proactively identifying and managing risks, organizations can minimize the likelihood of costly disruptions and losses.
Resource Focus: Directs attention towards proactively identifying and mitigating overall risk exposure, allowing for more efficient allocation of resources to address potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and emerging threats.
Regulatory Compliance: Compliance with regulatory requirements often necessitates robust risk management practices, making Exposure Management essential for regulatory compliance.
Strategic Decision-Making: Understanding and managing risks enables informed strategic decision-making, supporting sustainable growth and competitiveness.
Enhanced Stakeholder Confidence: Demonstrating a commitment to risk management instils confidence in stakeholders, including investors, customers, and partners.

Benefits of Exposure Management for Your Organization:

Key Components of Exposure Management:

Exposure Management involves a multi-step cycle or framework that ensures thoroughness and consistency. The key components include:

Scoping: This entails knowing what digital and physical assets you have. Scoping sees organizations catalog their entire digital footprint including hardware, software, data, network elements, code repositories, integrated supply chain systems, and any other technology assets. With EM, the scope is often wider than with traditional vulnerability management.
Discovery: Once you know what assets you have, the next step is assessing their vulnerabilities. This involves scanning for weaknesses, misconfigurations, outdated software, and other potential security gaps.
Prioritization: Not all vulnerabilities are equal in terms of the risk they pose. Exposure Management requires prioritizing these vulnerabilities based on factors like potential impact, ease of exploitation, and the asset’s importance to the business.
Validation: Ensuring that the measures taken are effective. This might involve penetration testing or other forms of security testing to validate the efficacy of the remediation efforts.
Mobilization: Organizations must have plans in place to respond to the detection of a threat or breach. This involves having the right tools, teams, and processes ready to act when a security incident occurs.
Feedback Loop: Taking what is learned from the mobilization and validation stages to improve the identification and prioritization processes, thereby refining the entire cycle.

Attack Surface

Exposure management uses attack path mapping to visualize how attackers can navigate through the system. It does this by identifying paths that exploit vulnerabilities or misconfigurations to compromise systems. This holistic approach enables the identification, prioritization, and remediation of critical exposures with precision and efficiency.

An example of how this can look like is visualized below, where there is an attack path from the attacker to workstation machines and potentially compromising the whole enterprise environment. Regular scanning and identification can help in identifying risks and impacts. Remediation strategies, ensure that vulnerabilities are addressed promptly, (for this case one example of a solution would be adjusting user roles) significantly reducing the chance of successful lateral movement by attackers.

PwC’s Exposure Management offering

PwC’s comprehensive suite of Cybersecurity and Privacy Services encompasses tailored solutions designed to mitigate risks and optimize opportunities for our clients. Traditional Vulnerability Management and Secure Configuration Management capabilities are highlighted in light orange while supplementary capabilities to achieve the full scope of our Exposure Management offering are highlighted in dark orange. These fundamental components ensure robust risk mitigation. Additionally, our suite extends to include a diverse array of specialized services, each tailored to meet the unique needs of our clients.

These services, represented in the graphic below, can be seamlessly integrated into our engagements, offering tailored solutions for conducting thorough assessments.

Why Choose PwC?

As a trusted partner in risk management we offer:

Expertise: Our team of experienced professionals brings deep expertise in Exposure Management across diverse industries and sectors.
Tailored Solutions: We understand that each organization faces unique risks and challenges. We collaborate closely with clients to develop customized Exposure Management solutions that align with their specific needs and objectives.
Proven Track Record: With a proven track record of delivering tangible results, we help clients navigate complex risk landscapes and achieve sustainable success.

In today's dynamic business environment, effective Exposure Management is not just a best practice - it's a strategic imperative. We aim to strengthen your organization's resilience, minimize risk exposure, and unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation.

For more information or to schedule a consultation, please contact us.