Tenable Redefines Cybersecurity With Exposure Management Approach

In 2024, the average cost of a data breach in India rose to ₹195 million, a 39% increase since 2020. Despite growing security investments, organisations continue to face breaches because traditional vulnerability lists often lack business context.

In an interaction with CiOL, Rajnish Gupta, MD & Country Manager, Tenable India, shared insights on how exposure management is reshaping cybersecurity by enabling organisations to move from reactive defence to proactive risk reduction. He discussed how enterprises can achieve contextual visibility into attack paths, minimise alert fatigue, and focus on addressing the vulnerabilities that truly impact business resilience.

How are attackers today exploiting the interconnected nature of cloud, identity, IoT, and on-premises systems to create new attack paths?

“Threat adversaries have always gone after the weakest link, leveraging established trust relationships between systems to move laterally, escalate privileges and take control of the IT infrastructure. The interconnected nature of cloud, identity, IoT, and on-premise systems means that when attackers compromise one domain, they use it as a bridge to pivot into another, creating new and highly effective attack paths that bypass traditional perimeter defences.”

Organisations are investing more in security tools, so why do breaches keep happening?

Organisations have various tools for detecting and managing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity threats, data exposures, and more. These products rarely work well together, resulting in tool sprawl that bloats security budgets, causes operational friction, and worsens alert fatigue. Unfortunately, risk prioritisation takes a backseat as cyber teams end up working in silos, looking at different tools, fed by disparate data sources.

Security isn’t just about identifying vulnerabilities; it’s about understanding them in context. Exposure management brings together all the essential elements of a modern, risk-based strategy, allowing teams to close visibility gaps, expose possible attack pathways, protect what matters most and cut through alert noise by prioritising the risks that pose the greatest threat.

What are the immediate, practical steps organisations should take to disrupt likely attack paths before they’re exploited?

The first practical step is establishing complete and unified asset visibility. From traditional IT and cloud infrastructure to identities and applications, organisations must eliminate blind spots and achieve total visibility across the entire extended attack surface. The next step is to continuously look beyond CVEs to catch preventable risks like cloud misconfigurations and excessive user permissions, which attackers often exploit first.

Organisations must then consolidate risk data and aggregate and normalise alerts from disparate security tools into a single, unified view. This feeds into a robust prioritisation engine where a consistent scoring method applies both technical context, like exploitability, and crucial business context, such as asset criticality, to identify the few truly critical exposures.

As enterprises digitise but keep legacy systems, what unique vulnerabilities appear and how can they be mitigated?

Older systems pose significant risks due to their inability to integrate modern security, reliance on outdated identity controls, and poorly secured connection points to cloud applications. This creates exploitable backdoors and allows attackers to pivot across the IT infrastructure. Data migration from legacy systems can also propagate errors and malware. A robust exposure management platform can mitigate these risks by providing full visibility into the entire attack surface, including legacy systems, and prioritising exploitable vulnerabilities based on threat intelligence and business context. This allows security teams to focus resources on the most critical exposures.

Automation is hyped — what should be automated and what requires human oversight?

Automation is a non-negotiable for anything that demands speed and scale to tackle known exposures at machine speed. We’re talking about the heavy lifting, including continuous data ingestion, normalisation, and initial risk scoring across the entire attack surface. Automation is the engine that sifts through the noise, helping connect the dots across mountains of vulnerability data to arrive at a highly contextualised view of risk. At the end of the day, automation is table stakes for managing the massive volume of day-to-day security tasks and really starting to move the needle on our overall risk profile, ensuring the operational tempo so the team isn't drowning in alerts.

Conversely, human judgement has to be in the driver's seat for creative problem-solving or strategic input to avoid getting caught flat-footed by blind spots. While automated platforms like exposure management can flag vulnerabilities based on their business impact, it takes a seasoned analyst to perform the necessary check: understanding that a technically low-scoring bug might be sitting on the system that is the company's crown jewel. Humans are essential for big-picture threat hunting, where you need to go off-script and look for novel attack paths that automated tools aren't programmed to spot.

How can CISOs translate preventive security into measurable business outcomes for boards, insurers and regulators?

For many CISOs and board-level leaders, quarterly cybersecurity updates are a source of tension. They struggle to translate technical jargon into strategic business conversations because their teams spend countless hours manually aggregating and analysing data from disparate, siloed security tools, each with its own risk scoring. This fragmented view hinders a clear understanding of control effectiveness and overall business risk.

Instead of focusing on CVE counts, SOC tickets, and intrusion attempts, CISOs can use exposure management platforms to present a comprehensive picture of risks and mitigation steps. For example, they can highlight 50 critical exposures that threaten operational continuity and explain how these could lead to attack pathways that erode brand trust. By offering insights into exploitation likelihood, potential impact, and remediation, exposure management provides CISOs with the language boards understand, emphasising prioritisation and decisive action.

How should cybersecurity strategy adapt to satisfy regulators', insurers' and board members' expectations?

Addressing these concerns demands that security leaders view cybersecurity as an important risk-management function. Strategy must evolve to focus on three shifts: establishing continuous and demonstrable due care, linking security controls directly to financial risk modelling, and delivering business-centric reporting of cyber risk.

Concerning regulation, organisations must move beyond installing security controls to tick compliance checklists. Cybersecurity must become a strategic risk-management function to shift from reactive to preventive. Insurers and regulators want proof that security controls are effective and consistently maintained. The strategy should mandate reporting that maps security exposure directly against common control frameworks (like NIST or ISO), simplifying audits and drastically improving insurability by showing a proactive reduction in risk.

For board discussions, security leaders must translate technical performance into enterprise risk and financial terms. Exposure management platforms help them achieve this goal. This approach ensures reporting is more than identifying the number of vulnerabilities patched. It contextualises the understanding of cyber risk and helps CISOs articulate the strategic actions needed to reduce the probability of a major breach by a defined percentage. This shifts the conversation from technical spending to strategic capital preservation and risk-adjusted return on investment.

For India, where breach costs have climbed and cloud, legacy systems, and connected devices expand the attack surface the move from vulnerability management to exposure management is no longer optional. As Rajnish Gupta emphasises, security must shift from metric counting to context-driven, business-aligned action. That change will determine whether organisations can convert security spend into demonstrable risk reduction, operational continuity, and preserved brand trust.