The Buyer's Guide to Exposure Assessment Platforms
Table of Contents
The state of exposure management
Core capabilities of an EAP
Integrations
Core capabilities of an EAP – Integrations
A robust Exposure Assessment Platform (EAP) starts with comprehensive integrations to ingest data from your existing security and IT tools (APIs). Without a seamless data flow, you won’t achieve unified visibility across your entire attack surface. Integrations form the backbone of your EAP and ensure that data from every corner of your environment is continuously available, accurate, and actionable. To make this possible, evaluate EAP solutions for the following:
Comprehensive, built-in integrations
An effective EAP offers a breadth of built-in integrations with the common and homegrown security and IT tools in your stack, such as vulnerability assessment (VA), endpoint detection and response (EDR), cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), patch management, Active Directory, SSO, etc. These integrations pull in data from everywhere: internal systems, external sources, cloud services, end-user devices, and software vulnerabilities.
To be more useful, the data collected by the EAP should go beyond surface level information like MAC, IP, Host, CVE Name, etc. The depth of the data available via integration – source level attributes – are necessary for enhanced business context definition and prioritization.
Flexible, bi-directional data flow
An Exposure Assessment Platform’s integrations shouldn’t just pull data in. A robust EAP should also push data and actions out into your downstream operational ecosystem, such as your security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), configuration management database (CMDB), and ticketing systems. This bi-directional flow helps streamline and automate your remediation workflows, which accelerates your response times and ensures you can address critical risks before they become problems.
Live, continuous visibility
Integrations must update continuously and provide live visibility into not just asset presence but also state. Real-time updates are critical because, without them, you’re working with outdated information, which increases the risk of missing critical exposures entirely.
At enterprise scale—where tens of thousands of assets, thousands of vulnerabilities,
and constantly changing software configurations create a massive attack surface—
stale data is a serious liability.
A single undetected misconfiguration can be the entry point an adversary needs. Live and continuous data pipelines mean you’re always operating with the latest intelligence, without having to trigger manual refreshes or deal with stale data.
Fully managed integrations and data accuracy
Managing integrations can be resource-intensive, so look for an Exposure Assessment Platform (EAP) that offers a fully managed integration framework where the vendor:
- Proactively monitors integration compatibility
- Manages the correlation and deduplication of the data
- Supports evolving data structures
- Handles all required updates
- Provides agentless API integrations for seamless connectivity
This means the vendor takes care of everything: keeping your APIs up to date, ensuring feeds don’t break, and monitoring integration compatibility. They handle the heavy lifting of reconciling duplicates, eliminating false negatives, and maintaining data accuracy. Think of it as hiring a top-tier engineer to keep your EAP running at peak performance, so it can deliver a reliable, always-on view of your attack surface without draining your engineering resources.