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Exposure management is changing the way we assess risk, but not everyone is out in front in this race. As organizations look to vet vendors, IDC has created the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Exposure Management Vendor Assessment to help decision-makers in the process.
The premier global market intelligence provider for IT markets, IDC empowers Tech Buyers to make informed choices based on research methodologies that “maintain objectivity, integrity, and independence” in all their analysis.
Exposure management is a business-centric paradigm for risk reduction and transcends limited approaches like vulnerability management alone.
IDC’s report provides valuable insights into the vendors best positioned to support an exposure management implementation—and one that delivers the scope, scale, and context the category has come to be known for.
The Rapid Growth of the Global Exposure Management Market
Exposure management in cybersecurity is still relatively new. It was created in response to patchwork solutions that offered limited visibility, and “fix it lists” that were detached from bottom-line business goals.
Risk Reduction is Getting Harder
In a recent survey of 400 IT and security professionals, over half (51%) stated that risk reduction was more difficult today than it was 24 months ago. Leading reasons include:
- More public cloud services (45%)
- Manual processes in SecOps (40%)
- Disconnected tools and data (40%)
- Gaps in security tools and monitoring processes (39%)
- Increasing complexity and volume of security alerts (36%)
And more. Not surprisingly, numbers indicated that threat and exposure budgets are growing, with 88% reporting those budgets are increasing year over year.
But are they doing it right? According to the IDC report, 53% admit to prioritizing their exposure workflow based on partial information (like CVSS scores or vulnerability lists), rather than on algorithms that can assess comprehensive attack surface risks and order them by severity.
Companies are Leaning into Exposure Management
Exposure management, or exposure assessment, goes beyond siloed approaches like vulnerability management and even risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) to provide a comprehensive view of the entire attack surface.
It then presents these findings in the context of which threats are most pressing to critical operations, empowering security leaders to make business-centric decisions.
Gartner states, “by 2026, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be 3x less likely to suffer a breach.” The Global Exposure Management Market is expected to hit USD 14.71 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 26.8% within the next seven years.
As Gartner created a category for it only three years ago, it’s been interesting to watch which vendors already had the capabilities to take the lead.
What Makes an Exposure Management Leader? Ask IDC.
What defines a leader in the exposure management space today? The answer is critical to the outcomes discerning buyers can expect to achieve.
Despite vast resources, it’s not all brawn. Microsoft, for example, was ranked by IDC as a “major player,” while Tenable was listed as a “leader.” Let’s examine the qualities that went into that assessment.
IDC Critical Success Factors
According to the report, the rankings were determined on the criteria below:
- Unified visibility across all exposures, while giving users the ability to prioritize the work.
- Automation of the remediation workflow.
- Contextual risk analysis: Out-of-the-box integration with additional sources of exposure data (beyond vulnerability scans alone).
As well as ease-of-use functionalities like:
- Predictable pricing with limited add-ons.
- Straightforward customer support.
- A wide ecosystem of MSSP and channel partners.
What That Looks Like
To give an example of what Tech Buyers should be looking for, IDC notes the qualities of one of the companies positioned in the Leaders category:
“The platform can ingest exposure data from a wide range of source types. This extensibility supports large-scale, complex environments and allows customers to tailor the platform to their unique technology stacks without heavy reliance on additional point solutions.”
Additionally, Leaders lean heavily into AI-driven analytics and may offer an extensive repository of exposure data to better pinpoint the most critical risks.
On the Path to Exposure Management Maturity
In an all-encompassing market like exposure management, taking the lead isn’t easy. It comes with a wealth of next-level capabilities and demands prior excellence in a number of risk reduction areas.
Other players in the evolving market (and in the IDC report) include Microsoft, Qualys, ForeScout, Darktrace, Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro, and nearly two dozen other leading cybersecurity vendors.
As IDC’s 2025 Exposure Management Survey explains, the most critical feature of exposure management platforms is still “vulnerability prioritization, with integration of real-time threat intelligence and attack path analysis next in order, respectively.”
Conclusion
There’s a lot to learn and much to be discovered in the field of exposure management. Traditional risk reduction is giving way to a more cyber-mature, business-aware paradigm of total attack surface intelligence.
As that happens, it is interesting to note who’s at the top and how vendors are starting to measure up. These days, the name of the game is business-centric cybersecurity. And so far, the ones that offer the most unified visibility, threat context, and workflow automation are leading the pack.
