The Buyer's Guide to Exposure Assessment Platforms
Table of Contents
The state of exposure management
Core capabilities of an EAP
Discovery
Core capabilities of an EAP – Discovery
Exposure Assessment Platform (EAP) Discovery
Discovery in an EAP is more than just a snapshot of your environment. It’s a dynamic,
ongoing process that brings together telemetry from across your security ecosystem
to give you real-time visibility into the state of your attack surface.
It’s about visibility, accuracy, and context—everything you need to understand
your risks and take action to mitigate them.
Multi-sourced asset discovery
At its core, discovery is about identifying every asset in your environment—whether it’s an endpoint device, server, IoT device, or a cloud-based resource.
Quick Tip:
An EAP’s discovery should inform you on what’s in your environment, who owns it, what software it runs, and, critically, what vulnerabilities it might have.
To achieve this an Exposure Assessment Platform (EAP) should use a multi-sourced approach with a powerful aggregation and correlation engine that reconciles data using a broad range of attributes and signals from various sources across the security stack. It should also provide transparency into the rationale behind each correlation so you can validate the results yourself. This multi-sourced approach ensures you’re working from a complete asset inventory and that every asset is mapped correctly.
Once assets are identified, the EAP should dynamically track and monitor the relationships between these assets. An asset graph, a data model that builds a virtual map of your attack surface, makes this possible. By correlating devices, users, vulnerabilities, software, and configurations, it’s like connecting all the dots to create a complete picture of your security posture. This is invaluable because it not only provides real-time visibility and monitoring of your attack surface but also helps reveal vulnerable attack paths in the security posture, highlighting areas where adversaries might exploit weaknesses.
The power of accurate correlation
Accurate asset correlation is critical. Without it, you could end up wasting time and resources on duplicate assets or fail to detect critical exposures by incorrectly merging two separate assets into one record. For example, imagine thinking you’ve secured a server only to later discover that two different servers were mistakenly deduplicated, and only one of them was actually secured. The goal of correlation is to make sure that each asset is accurately discovered, deduplicated, and that its potential impact on the security posture and attack surface is clearly understood.
Quick Tip:
To assess the accuracy of asset correlation, it’s important to evaluate how multiple platforms handle the same data.
By comparing how different platforms correlate assets and detect exposures, you can better understand which solution provides the most precise and reliable results
This is where the EAP goes beyond just asset discovery to bring in vulnerability management and configuration visibility. Instead of relying on siloed inventories and vulnerability scanners, the EAP gives you a unified view that ties asset data to the vulnerabilities they harbor, without the need to pivot between multiple tools and systems. This ensures that you always know which vulnerabilities are associated with which devices, software, or configurations, and you can act accordingly.
With the EAP consolidating and correlating this data, you can perform cross-condition queries, which allow you to identify not just vulnerabilities, but also how multiple factors affect the same asset, such as a critical CVE combined with the absence of an EDR agent.
Quick Tip:
Not all EAPs offer this level of insight, so it’s crucial to choose a platform with a strong understanding of the security controls at the asset level to give you this cross-condition context.
This deeper context helps you understand the full picture around each asset: who owns it, what software it’s running, and what security controls are in place. The result is an actionable understanding of your environment.
Continuous monitoring and attack surface visibility
An EAP’s discovery capabilities should provide continuous monitoring. In a dynamic environment, assets change constantly. Devices get added, configurations get updated, and new vulnerabilities are discovered. Your EAP should track these changes and adjust the attack surface map in real-time, so that you’re always up-to-date on the status of your assets and the security exposures in your environment.
Another critical piece of the discovery puzzle is identifying coverage gaps—when certain assets lack the right security controls or have misconfigured ones. Perhaps a device is missing an EDR or patch management agent, or the asset has not been scanned by a vulnerability assessment tool, leaving a hole in your defense. With continuous, accurate discovery, your EAP flags these gaps and helps you address them. Additionally, your Exposure Assessment Platform should provide a dashboard that continuously monitors your attack surface, offering real-time context for every asset..