Exposure Assessment Platforms

Cybersecurity leaders must regularly assess their overall vulnerabilities and threat exposure as a key input to security architecture and operations planning. This research helps security teams evaluate exposure assessment platform vendors.

Market Definition

Exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) continuously identify and prioritize exposures, such as vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, across a broad range of asset classes. They natively deliver or integrate with discovery capabilities, such as assessment tools, that enumerate exposures, like vulnerabilities and configuration issues, to increase visibility. EAPs use techniques like threat intelligence (TI) to analyze an organization’s attack surfaces and weaknesses, and prioritize treatment efforts for high-risk exposures by incorporating threat landscape, business and existing security control context. Through prioritized visualizations and treatment recommendations, EAPs help provide direction for mobilization, identifying the various teams involved in mitigation and remediation. EAPs are primarily delivered as self-hosted software or as a cloud service, and may use agents for exposure information collection.

Exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) discover, analyze and prioritize an organization’s exposures, such as vulnerabilities, gaps in compliance, unmanaged assets and asset misconfigurations across organizational attack surfaces, including (but not limited to) external, internal, cloud and end-user. Continuous discovery and inventory of attack surfaces, involving verification of known assets and discovery of unknown threats, is a key step in an exposure management program to provide sufficient visibility. To improve prioritization and treatment efforts, EAP consolidates discovered exposures and prioritizes them based on exposure severity, asset criticality, business impact, likelihood of exploitation and the context of security controls. The results are consolidated into a central location to improve operational efficiency, indicated through risk scoring, trends, stats and other visualizations, such as visibility/accessibility of assets (e.g., via attack path), asset identification/ownership and remediation tracking. The core purpose of EAPs is to provide a better, consolidated view of high-risk exposures enabling organizations to take key proactive actions to prevent breaches.

Report 2025

Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report here and view the magic quadrant graphic here.

Market Status	Market Vendor
Leader	Tenable
Leader	Rapid7
Leader	Qualys
Visionary	NopSec
Visionary	Sevco Security
Visionary	Balbix
Visionary	WithSecure
Niche Player	ServiceNow
Niche Player	Tanium
Niche Player	Brinqa
Niche Player	RedSeal
Niche Player	Trend Micro
Niche Player	Outpost24
Niche Player	PlexTrac
Niche Player	Vicarius
Challenger	Nucleus Security
Challenger	Armis
Challenger	XM Cyber
Challenger	Microsoft
Challenger	CrowdStrike