Exposure Analytics: Bridging the Gap Between Cybersecurity and Business Risk Management

Exposure Analytics is revolutionizing exposure management programs by collecting data across enterprise IT, cloud environments, and security stacks to help organizations:

✅ Measure and baseline cyber resilience
✅ Focus on the biggest risks
✅ Accelerate mitigation efforts

By providing the missing technological links, Exposure Analytics operationalizes Gartner’s recommended Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) approach, helping businesses prioritize security based on real-world impact.

The Pre-Exposure Analytics Era

As a security validation platform, Cymulate initially focused on validating security controls by automating attack simulations and identifying where they bypassed defenses.

That was a technological issue developed by tech-minded people for tech-minded people. At that time, cybersecurity remained the ultimate natural reserve for tech experts.

In that tech realm, discussions about improvements to the technology led to an expansion into a wider range of simulation types, evolving from the initial Breach and Attack Simulations (BAS) capabilities into Attack Surface Management (ASM) and Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART).

Customer feedback primarily revolved around technical tweaks, with conversations flowing easily in tech jargon. Requests frequently involved integrating Cymulate’s validation capabilities with vulnerability management, SIEM, SOAR, and other scanning, detection, response, and orchestration tools. The team responded rapidly to these requests, expanding the technological partner ecosystem and enriching findings with data from a growing number of sources.

Shifting Customer Priorities: From Technical Validation to Business Risk Alignment

As cybersecurity became a growing business concern, the nature of customer requests began to shift. With finite resources facing an ever-increasing number and complexity of threats, preventing every single breach became an unrealistic goal.

Customers started seeking ways to ensure that security posture management efforts focused on areas with the highest protective impact on operability and prioritized data protection based on business value.

The response to these concerns initially involved providing a quantified risk score based on verified resilience to attack simulations, along with data to rationalize and optimize cybersecurity tool stacks.

In an effort to address these needs, additional capabilities were added, including internal ASM, attack path mapping, lateral movement analysis, cloud security validation, and network segmentation validation.

Despite these enhancements, attempts to answer increasing customer requests for business-oriented solutions focused on improving risk scoring quantification granularity and depth, customizing reports, integrating with ticketing solutions, and other practical features. These advancements positioned Cymulate as the only security validation provider centralizing all these capabilities in a single platform.

However, from a business context perspective, a critical component was still missing.

The Breakthrough: Introducing Business Context in Risk Calculations

Through extensive collaboration with customers, analysts, and industry leaders, Cymulate Exposure Analytics emerged as the solution to this challenge.

Key Enhancements in Exposure Analytics:

• Contextualized Risk Scoring: Organizations can define their own business asset values, ensuring that risk scores reflect real-world impact.
• Integrated Data Feeds: The platform ingests, correlates, and prioritizes findings from multiple security sources.
• Business-Driven Remediation: Prioritization now accounts for operational dependencies, helping teams focus on the most critical threats.

Initially, risk assessments were purely technical, focusing on attack severity and impacted assets. However, partner feedback highlighted the disconnect between risk scores and business priorities. This led to a fundamental shift:

Instead of relying solely on automated risk calculations, organizations can now input their own risk parameters based on business value.

This transformed cyber risk assessments into a powerful business-aligned strategy, ensuring that cybersecurity efforts drive tangible operational resilience.

Putting it All Together 

The first realization was that existing products created disconnected pieces of the cybersecurity puzzle that needed to be connected to form a coherent image.

The second step involved acknowledging that no two organizations are the same, each having unique operational and business priorities. Creating a cybersecurity framework that is understandable to non-technical stakeholders requires accounting for these differences.

The third step was a collaborative effort between R&D, design partners, and advisors to conceptualize how to ingest diverse data feeds, correlate findings, and enable individualized asset business value customization to generate actionable insights.

The requirement for these insights was to guide remediation efforts toward prioritizing actions with the highest business impact.

Initially, risk calculations were conducted at the asset level, assigning a risk score based on the severity of security findings and the extent of impacted assets. While this approach was functional, it was insufficient.

Feedback from partners repeatedly highlighted the lack of business impact factors within risk calculations. This led to a re-evaluation of the approach, as risk assessments remained disconnected from business priorities and operational dependencies.

The solution involved introducing the concept of "business context." Since no unified datasets incorporated business context into risk score calculations, a mechanism was added for organizations to input their own risk perceptions based on individual asset value.

This inclusion transformed results, aligning security risk assessments with business valuation and providing a unified view that integrates cybersecurity priorities with overall business strategy.