Why Exposure Management Must Be a C-Suite PriorityWhy Exposure Management Must Be a C-Suite Priority

Now that it's 2025, the C-suite is out of time — and excuses — for avoiding this truth: Traditional vulnerability management no longer provides adequate protection against modern cyber threats. Why? Traditional vulnerability management focuses narrowly on certain types of assets and exposures. Further, it also prioritizes entirely around exposure severity, a measure of how easily a vulnerability could be exploited. This approach misses critical elements of true risk and business impact.

With data breach costs soaring to $4.88 million in 2024, according to IBM's "Cost of a Data Breach" report, business leaders must be ready not just to consider a different approach to cybersecurity but to actively make the shift.

What is this shift? It centers on exposure management, an approach that is significantly more sophisticated than traditional vulnerability management. Exposure management entails calculating risk based on multiple factors, including whether vulnerabilities actually have been exploited in the wild and their potential business impact. This distinction matters profoundly at the executive level, where decisions about security investments must align with business objectives.

Understanding Your Risk Landscape

In short, exposure management is about understanding your risk landscape holistically and aligning security efforts with business priorities. It eschews the narrow view of traditional vulnerability management and considers the entire attack surface. And instead of prioritizing remediation actions without context, exposure management enables organizations to maintain their cyber-risk level within defined risk appetite parameters.

This shift represents more than a technical evolution — it fundamentally changes how organizations evaluate and respond to cyber-risk. Where vulnerability management might identify thousands of potential weaknesses that allegedly require remediation, exposure management helps leaders understand which ones pose genuine business risks and thus truly deserve immediate attention.

The approach extends beyond traditional hardware and software to include intangible assets like intellectual property and reputation — assets that often appear on balance sheets under "goodwill." These intangible assets are exactly why exposure management transcends the domain of chief information security officers (CISOs) to matter across the entire executive level.

Building Integrated Security Operations

Exposure management addresses persistent operational challenges through three core components:

Through this integration of capabilities, organizations can achieve a true understanding of their security posture. The approach helps reduce friction between IT and security teams by providing better data integration and improved risk-based prioritization. This enables security teams to focus on preventing exposure exploitation rather than reactively responding to security incidents stemming from vast vulnerability backlogs.

Strategic Implementation

There are several considerations that deserve attention from executive leaders beginning this transition. First, exposure management solutions should accommodate existing cybersecurity investments rather than requiring wholesale replacement. Second, implementation should focus on establishing proper risk appetite parameters — determining acceptable levels of cyber-risk in pursuit of business objectives.

The transition requires organizations to shift toward a contextual, comprehensive view of cybersecurity risk. Cyber-risk quantification must evolve from subjective evaluations to objective, data-driven measurements. This strategic approach enables more informed decisions about security investments and provides clearer communication about security posture to stakeholders.

Preparing for Evolution

We've made the case for the shift. Now comes the pertinent question: How do leaders actually pull this off? It's one thing to have great intentions, and it's quite another to actually enact them. There's a big cognitive and logistical leap in between. So, let's break it down.

The initial step in implementing exposure management is to review your existing security stack to identify gaps in these critical areas:

As exposure management continues to take hold, solutions to support effective implementation and management will continue to evolve — and so, too, should the capabilities of your C-suite. This can't be a set-it-and-forget-it initiative. And leaders also can't wait around to see what happens next. Get started now or be left behind.

By Mike Riemer, Senior Vice President & Field CISO, 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 (NSG) 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 customers.

Mike has more than 40 years of technology and engineering experience with a demonstrated history of working in the cybersecurity industry.