Intentional Risk Management in Cybersecurity

Heads up: A major paradigm shift is transforming how companies approach cybersecurity. To position your organization for strategic efficiency and confident decision-making, you'll need to stay on top of this one.

Security tools are essential, but the right tools are only one part of the equation. It's time to start with a new, more strategic framework based on exposure management.

Why the shift? Traditional approaches to vulnerability management have reached their limits. Simply scanning for vulnerabilities and patching based on severity scores isn't enough. Organizations need a more comprehensive, practical, and proactive approach to protecting their digital infrastructure.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Exposure management is about understanding your risk landscape and aligning security efforts with business priorities. It is a prime example of working smarter, not harder.

When leaning into exposure management, you move from focusing primarily (or solely) on severity scores to considering actual business risk, from tracking activity-based metrics to measuring real security outcomes, and from siloed security operations to true collaboration between security teams, business units, and leadership.

You already know the cybersecurity adage that you can't protect what you can't see. Visibility is the bedrock of cybersecurity. With assets, data, applications, and users spread across environments, and shadow IT becoming increasingly commonplace, visibility has never been more important — or more challenging. But visibility alone is not enough. To optimize cybersecurity outcomes, you need visibility and a framework for prioritization and turning that visibility into action.

Here's a glance at the elements of an exposure management framework:

Making the Transition

Moving to an exposure management approach does not mean replacing your entire security stack. You're already ahead of the game if you start by understanding your current security posture and gaps, and then work to better integrate existing tools.

Here's how to begin:

The outcomes: fewer gaps. Less manual overhead. Mitigated risk.

What Tradeoffs Make Business Sense?

Your sense of urgency about exposure management should be proportional to what's at stake. Every organization has different priorities and levels of risk tolerance. Risk can be desirable when it's deliberately selected to create competitive advantage. The key is just that: Be deliberate about risk. Understand exactly what you're protecting and why.

Consider your sensitive data, company resources, stakeholder and customer trust, regulatory obligations, and operational stability. Where are you willing to make tradeoffs? Perhaps you're willing to take on the risk associated with allowing employees to work from home because it provides a competitive edge regarding recruitment and talent retention. The problem isn't risk itself; it's risk without intention.

It's worth noting that exposure management is a relatively new concept that is still evolving. But that doesn't mean you should wait around. Exposure management is about improving the efficacy of how threats are addressed, so even as threats evolve, you're ready to take them on and respond strategically and intentionally.

The question isn't whether you need exposure management — it's how quickly and effectively you can make the shift to this way of thinking.

By Mike Riemer, Senior Vice President, Network Security Group & Field CTO, Ivanti

About the Author

Mike Riemer has been with Ivanti since October 2014 and is an experienced global leader with a strong reputation in the security industry. He is responsible for all aspects of Ivanti's Network Security Group products and engineering. As field CISO, Mike works closely with Ivanti customers and sales teams to assess IT security requirements and provide a streamlined process to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Mike has more than 40 years' technology and engineering experience with a demonstrated history of working in the cybersecurity industry.