By Michael Mumcuoglu, Co-Founder and CEO, CardinalOps
In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations face an overwhelming challenge: understanding and addressing the many types of security exposures that put them at risk. These exposures include misconfigured and ineffective security controls, missing prevention policies, gaps in asset coverage, insufficient detection coverage, unpatched software vulnerabilities, and much more. Any of these weaknesses can be exploited by adversaries, increasing the likelihood of a breach.
Organizations have responded by investing in multiple vulnerability and posture management tools to gain visibility into their security posture. However, the sheer volume of findings and the complexity of managing them have created new challenges. Through conversations with our customers, we’ve identified three main obstacles preventing effective threat exposure management:
1. Siloed Teams & Tools
Security teams often manage separate products with little integration, making it nearly impossible to determine focus areas, report on overall risk, and prioritize effectively. For example, we’ve heard from customers that getting a clear answer on the status of a single control – ex: Is it enabled? Is it configured correctly? – can be a constant struggle. Without a consolidated view, teams spend excessive time sifting through disjointed data, leading to inefficiencies and increased risk.
2. Fragmented Prioritization
Prioritizing exposures requires a deep understanding of asset criticality, threat intelligence, and business impact. However, security teams frequently make prioritization decisions without full context – such as which assets run critical applications, hold sensitive information, or are internet-facing. Without visibility into the highest severity exposures and adversary behavior targeting their industry, organizations waste valuable time and resources addressing lower-risk issues while missing truly critical threats.
One of the most commonly overlooked prioritization contexts is that of Compensating Controls. Every exposure can be mitigated in multiple ways such as patching a vulnerability, activating a prevention control, reducing the attack surface through hardening, or deploying a new detection to monitor for threats. Without a holistic view of these available controls and their current effectiveness, teams struggle to make informed decisions that maximize security impact with minimal risk and business disruption
3. Inconsistent Remediation Workflows
Even when exposures are identified and prioritized, organizations struggle with ensuring consistent and efficient remediation. CISOs need to ensure that critical exposures are addressed within required SLAs, exceptions are properly approved, and risk acceptance decisions are justified and auditable. Without standardized workflows, security teams are left scrambling to track remediation progress, making compliance reporting and breach prevention increasingly difficult.
Introducing CardinalOps Threat Exposure Management
To address these challenges, we are excited to announce the expansion of CardinalOps Threat Exposure Management – an AI-powered platform designed to bring visibility, intelligence, and efficiency to security exposure management. CardinalOps unifies visibility of security controls and findings across prevention and detection to quickly pinpoint and prioritize risk, maximize efficiency with compensating controls, and streamline safe remediation of exposures.
What Sets CardinalOps Apart?
At CardinalOps, innovation is at the core of everything we do. Our Threat Exposure Management platform is built to deliver:
- Holistic Coverage – A unified approach spanning both detection and prevention controls, integrating with a wide range of third-party tools to provide full visibility across your existing security stack.
- Adversary Behavioral Threat Intelligence – Operationalizing threat intelligence to assess exposure risks based on real-world adversary tactics, ensuring organizations focus on the most relevant threats.
- Prioritize with Compensating Controls – A cross-layer approach that factors in existing security tools and configurations, enabling teams to apply the most effective prioritization and mitigation strategies.
- Impact Analysis for Safe and Automated Remediation – Providing actionable insights that help organizations remediate threats without unnecessary operational risk.
The Future of Threat Exposure Management
With this launch, we’re challenging organizations to rethink their approach to threat exposure management. It’s time to move beyond fragmented efforts and siloed tools and embrace a unified, context-driven strategy that delivers meaningful risk reduction. For our team and partners, this is about fostering stronger collaboration and delivering measurable improvements in security posture. For our customers, it means gaining better visibility, smarter prioritization, and consistent workflows that ensure exposures are addressed efficiently and effectively.
Ultimately, our mission is clear: to empower organizations to take smarter, faster, and more informed action to protect their environments. We invite security teams to join us on this journey and experience a new era of proactive, risk-driven threat exposure management.