Not all exposure management platforms are created equal. But how can you pick the right one for your organization? Here’s a set of questions designed to help you cut through vendor noise and make an informed decision.

When shopping for an exposure management platform, asking vendors the right questions is critical. If you don't, you could end up with a platform that offers limited visibility and doesn't deliver on your expectations or requirements.

Take, for example, the popular sales pitch from vendors in the endpoint detection and response (EDR) space: the promise of a “single agent” capable of discovering and scanning all assets across your environment. It sounds simple and efficient, but the reality is often a flawed story of false consolidation. Their “good enough” coverage can leave gaping holes in your cybersecurity and compliance posture.

Here's why: EDR platforms retrofitted for exposure management rely on endpoint agents that can't assess every asset, providing only partial coverage. Without visibility into assets such as databases, networking devices, and IoT/OT devices, you’ll miss exposures affecting a significant portion of your attack surface. What’s more, the limited data they do collect is often funneled into a less-than-transparent risk scoring engine, leaving your team to guess which exposures pose legitimate risk and which are just noise.

Even when they’re built with network scanning capabilities for asset discovery and vulnerability assessment, EDR vendors’ “exposure management” offerings frequently flag false positives or fail to detect known CVEs and other critical exposures including SQL flaws, weak ciphers, and more. 

This isn't just inefficient; it's a critical security shortcoming. While your team drowns in zero-context alerts and chases low-risk vulnerabilities, attackers exploit the exposures affecting assets that your endpoint agent can't see.

What’s more, EDR solutions retrofitted for exposure management require extensive integrations to provide the minimum scanning coverage and remediation capabilities to function as a vulnerability or exposure management solution. This effectively undermines the claim EDR vendors make about the supposed simplicity and cost-effectiveness of the single-agent architecture.

By contrast, an effective exposure management platform is built on three pillars: deep, comprehensive vulnerability and exposure data across all assets; transparent and precise exposure prioritization; and guided remediation. It provides a single, integrated workflow to manage the entire exposure lifecycle — from advanced vulnerability and exposure intelligence and AI-driven prioritization all the way through to patch management and response validation.

So, before you sign a contract for a platform that overpromises and under-delivers, arm yourself with these questions.

7 questions to ask your EDR provider about their exposure management solution

1. Can you see my entire attack surface?

2. Do you dig deeper than a simple software version check?

3. How quickly do you provide CVE coverage?

4. What’s your methodology for risk scoring?

5. You found a problem. How do you help us fix it?

6. How do you find insecure identities?

7. What compliance frameworks does your exposure management platform support?

1. Can you see my entire attack surface?

An agent-centric approach guarantees you'll have dangerous blind spots. Today's attack surface goes far beyond the endpoint to include legacy servers, OT systems, cloud workloads, AI tools, IoT devices, web apps, and network infrastructure.

A real exposure management platform provides a complete and accurate inventory of every asset using multiple detection methods — including active scanning, passive network scanning, and agent-based coverage. Just as importantly, it provides 360-degree context on how those assets connect to each other and the internet. And the coverage must extend across all your different operating systems, cloud platforms, and network segments. 

Recognizing that agent-based scanning is insufficient, some EDR vendors have retroactively added network scanning capabilities to their platform. This isn’t a good sign. Often this network scanner will rely on the agent, which limits its reach to the agent’s coverage area, potentially missing entire groups of assets in other network segments. These network scanners also often lack stability and perform poorly in complex enterprise environments. And their accuracy is questionable, especially with regards to detecting open ports and web apps.

Once you have a single, unified view of all your assets and their security issues across all your domains, you’ve laid the foundation for exposure management’s superpower: proactive, preventive risk reduction, as opposed to reactive threat defense.

Ask them: 

• How do you provide a single, unified view of every asset and exposure across my entire environment, considering that your platform relies primarily on an agent for detection?


• Can your agent “see” assets in all major operating systems platforms, or just Windows, and across all network segments?


• How do you detect assets that can’t be scanned by endpoint agents, such as networking infrastructure, IoT/OT devices, web apps, AI tools, and many others?


• If you offer a network scanner, is it dependent on the agent for its reach and functionality?


• Can you provide real-world benchmarks of your scanner’s performance and accuracy in large, segmented enterprise networks?

2. Do you dig deeper than a simple software version check?

Many EDR tools dressed up as exposure management solutions simply check for outdated software. This shallow approach generates a high volume of low-priority alerts and misses entire classes of risk. Real, exploitable issues often lie deeper than a version number.

Deeper analysis beyond basic CVEs, into dynamic link libraries (DLL) files and registry keys, is the difference between finding real, exploitable issues and chasing false positives.

Ask them: Can your platform detect critical security gaps not tied to a specific CVE, including misconfigurations, weak ciphers, open remote-desktop ports, SQL flaws, registry key issues, and compromised DLLs?

3. How quickly do you provide CVE coverage?

In cybersecurity, speed is everything. Relying solely on the public National Vulnerability Database, which has well-documented delays, is no longer sufficient. 

When attackers are exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability or when a public proof-of-concept exploit is released, you can’t be left exposed for days or even weeks while your vendor waits for public databases to catch up.

Ask EDR vendors how quickly they provided coverage in these recent situations:

• Fortinet SQL injection vulnerability CVE-2025-25257: Disclosed on July 7, 2025. Tenable had a detection plug-in that same day.


• Cursor AI code editor’s code execution vulnerability CVE-2025-54136: A public PoC was released on Aug. 4, 2025. Tenable published its detection plug-in the next day.


• WinRAR path traversal vulnerability CVE-2025-8088: Disclosed on Aug. 8, 2025. Tenable published its detection plug-in on Aug. 10, a day before an exploit was released.

The key here is to choose a vendor whose vulnerability research team provides the foundation for its exposure management platform and offers: exposure intelligence, security advisories and alerts, data science insights, and zero-day research.

Ask them: Do you have a dedicated research team that provides vulnerability and exposure intelligence faster than public sources? Can you show me specific examples?

4. What’s your methodology for risk scoring?

A risk score without a clear explanation is just a number. You need to understand the “why?” behind every score you're given.

For example, the risk calculation can’t be based on a limited dataset, like endpoint telemetry alone. To be meaningful and precise, it must be based on an analysis of trillions of data points, including vulnerability details, threat intelligence, and asset criticality.

You need a platform whose prioritization methodology is clear, so it can pinpoint the exposures you need to address first based on exploitability and impact.

Ask them: How is your risk score calculated? Is your model transparent, or is it a “black box”? 

5. You found a problem. How do you help us fix it?

Watch out for vendors that think that vulnerability scanning is synonymous with exposure management, and use the terms interchangeably. This is a huge misunderstanding on their part. Vulnerability scanning is just one component of exposure management. Not all vulnerabilities represent exposures. Exposures are toxic combinations of preventable risks — such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions — that attackers are likely to exploit and that have the potential to do significant harm to an organization.

Finding exposures is only half the battle. An exposure management platform must bridge the gap between security and IT operations by providing a clear path to remediation, not just a list of problems without any context or prioritization. 

Specifically, these capabilities are key: integrating exposure-response workflows to assign remediation tasks; tracking them against business service-level agreements (SLAs); and verifying the fix. 

A comprehensive exposure management platform maximizes a team’s efficiency by identifying when a single patch can supersede multiple older ones and fix dozens of underlying vulnerabilities in one fell swoop.

Take a pass if the platform only provides high-level "guidance" that requires your team to revert to manual ticketing, spreadsheets, and endless email threads.

Ask them: 

• Is the scope of your exposure management platform limited to vulnerability scanning?


• How does your platform identify the combinations of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identity security weaknesses that combine to create high-risk attack paths leading to my organization’s most critical data and assets?


• How does it mobilize my remediation teams to fix critical exposures so that our response is streamlined and automated, instead of slow and disjointed?

6. How do you find insecure identities?

Determining who has access to critical data is essential, especially in cloud security. That’s why your exposure management platform must have robust identity intelligence: so it can give you a clear and prioritized view of all identity entitlements across your environment, including your multi-cloud environments.

Anything less falls short, because a single, seemingly low-risk vulnerability can become a five-alarm fire when combined with excessive user permissions and public-facing internet access. Attackers hunt these toxic combinations.

While EDR-centric platforms can spot an attack in progress, they do little to help you proactively find and fix the identity flaws — the underlying misconfigurations and credential vulnerabilities — that let attackers in and allow them to move laterally and elevate their privileges.

In short, an exposure management platform must holistically understand a role’s effective permissions — the permissions granted by all the policies that apply to it — and analyze identity entitlements in depth to effectively prioritize risk.

For example, your platform must do things like:

• Provide deep visibility into your cloud infrastructure entitlements, including federated and third-party identities, to address supply chain risks.


• Identify every identity with write-access to a specific production database via a simple, no-code query, as opposed to via a complex rigamarole.


• Restrict permissions at a granular level down to a specific asset, such as a single AWS S3 bucket, which is key for true “least privilege” control and attack surface reduction.


• Provide one-click automated remediation for overprivileged identities, and grant temporary just-in-time access that expires automatically.

Ask them: How do you discover and prioritize assets with dangerous combinations of flaws – involving unpatched vulnerabilities, insecure identities, and public exposure – that put us at risk of cloud data breaches?

7. What compliance frameworks does your exposure management platform support?

Your platform must help you demonstrate compliance and communicate your security posture to leadership.

Demonstrating compliance out-of-the-box across diverse frameworks is a non-negotiable business requirement. Your exposure management platform must validate your posture by mapping vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identity issues to specific controls within major compliance frameworks and generate audit-ready reports. Otherwise, you are left with a significant operational burden and potential audit and compliance failures (not to mention the fines that can come with them).

In addition, your exposure management platform must help you explain your security posture to your business leaders, and unpack for them where your organization is strong and where it needs further cyber investments. 

Specifically, it should streamline and automate the creation of business-aligned scorecards; the tracking of your remediation efforts against SLAs; and the benchmarking of your security posture against industry peers.

Ask them: Can you generate audit-ready reports and help us explain our security posture to the C-suite and the board?

Steer clear of “wannabe” exposure management platforms

Don't settle for an exposure management platform that leaves you asking more questions than it answers. By demanding comprehensive visibility, transparent prioritization, and clear remediation paths, you can empower your teams to move beyond reactive firefighting and build a truly proactive, risk-based security program.

Learn more:

• Read the first two blogs in our series:
  -- “Exposure Management Beyond the Endpoint”
  -- “Relying on EDR for Exposure Management? Here’s What You Need to Know”


• View the on-demand webinar “Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive”


• Request a demo

The post 7 Questions EDR Providers Hope You Won’t Ask About Their “Exposure Management” Solution appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Christopher Day

Source: Security Boulevard
Source Link: https://securityboulevard.com/2025/11/7-questions-edr-providers-hope-you-wont-ask-about-their-exposure-management-solution/