One Year Later: The Tangible ROI of Exposure Management After Year One

In theory, Exposure Management offers teams a direct, structured way to reduce complexity and regain control. It’s supposed to sharpen focus, accelerate response times, and make risk easier to understand and act on. 

But what about in practice? How do our customers and others quantify the value that Exposure Management systems deliver, one year after deployment – after twelve months of day-to-day use?

We posed this question to our in-house experts: Jason Fruge, CISO In Residence, and Caleb Jones, Executive Value Director. Below, we’ve collected their responses as to where value shows up in practice and what decision-makers can point to as proof that it’s working.

1. Reduced Attack Surface

One of the clearest wins after twelve months of Exposure Management is a smaller, more controlled attack surface. As teams start to eliminate unnecessary access points, tighten configurations, and shut down services that don’t need to be exposed – they reduce the number of pathways an attacker can exploit.

As Jason notes: “We’re not trying to solve everything. We’re trying to shrink the parts of the surface that are both reachable and exploitable.” This focus drives measurable impact. For example, XM Cyber’s 2024 State of Exposure Management report found that the platform helped enterprise customers uncover over 40 million exposures tied to 11.5 million critical business assets. By concentrating on exposures that matter most – those located at attack path junctions – organizations eliminated 98 % of exploitable risk. This left them free to better address the 2 % of exposures that posed real risk. A big win.

2. Improved Risk Prioritization

After a year with Exposure Management in place, security teams are spending more time on the vulnerabilities that actually matter. Low-risk issues are quickly moved aside, and the backlog shrinks.

As Caleb explains, Exposure Management reshapes the way teams work – “allowing you to focus resources on things that matter most.” Teams stop chasing every alert and start addressing the exposures most likely to lead to compromise.

That focus pays off. Gartner estimates that organizations running a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to experience a breach by 2026. 

3. Enhanced Visibility Across Assets

Twelve months of Exposure Management offer teams a much clearer view of every asset – on-prem, in the cloud, IoT, and more. Shadow systems can no longer hide, and blind spots begin to disappear.

Jason notes that “…Exposure Management is much more than just CVEs.” This is because Exposure Management surfaces not just known vulnerabilities, but also misconfigurations, unauthorized assets, and overlooked dependencies. This is likely why 43% of organizations are now investing in Exposure Management specifically to close asset visibility gaps, especially in complex, hybrid environments.

4. Faster Time to Remediation

One year in, teams using Exposure Management are moving faster to fix what matters. With prioritized alerts and automated workflows, remediation becomes more focused, more consistent, and far less reactive.

Jason mentions how Exposure Management enables teams to cut through the noise and address real issues without delay. The results are measurable. Organizations using exposure-led programs remediate vulnerabilities up to 55% faster than those relying on traditional methods. And shrinking Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) by even a few days can significantly reduce the window of opportunity for attackers.

5. Better Alignment with Risk and Compliance Frameworks

Exposure Management helps teams map vulnerabilities directly to regulatory mandates. This makes audits less painful and lowers the risk of penalties.

Jason explains that Exposure Management “brings clarity to where you stand with security controls” – meaning it helps teams move beyond guesswork when aligning with formal frameworks.

Industry data backs this up. Reports show 70% of risk and compliance professionals are shifting away from checkbox exercises and toward continuous, risk-based approaches. 

That shift matters. In the EU alone, regulatory penalties for noncompliance with GDPR and NIS2 can climb into the millions – often tied to failure to detect or remediate known exposures.

6. Data-Driven Security Decisions

Exposure Management turns guesswork into clear, quantifiable strategy. It lets teams make decisions backed by hard data, and links technical action to business impact in ways leadership can see and understand.

Jason emphasizes this point clearly: Exposure Management shifts the conversation from vulnerability counts to risk context, giving teams the insights to act with confidence and precision.

That approach is backed up by recent research. A 2024 study found that threat-centric prioritization models – those that incorporate business context and attack likelihood – improved the identification of exploitable vulnerabilities by over 70%, while reducing remediation costs by up to 25% annually.

7. Continuous Monitoring and Assessment

Exposure Management ensures constant vigilance. It tracks changes in systems, users, and software automatically – keeping teams in sync with their environment and avoiding surprises.

Jason speaks to this need for ongoing awareness: “We don’t want to just look at this once and forget about it.” That commitment to continuous insight guarantees that teams notice drift, discover new exposures, and act before issues escalate.

The market reflects this shift. Industry analysis projects the CTEM market will grow at a 10.1% CAGR from 2024 to 2029. Clearly, organizations are increasingly relying on continuous discovery and prioritization – not point-in-time checks.

8. Reduced Business Disruption

Cyber incidents don’t just create headlines – they can stop a business cold. One missed exposure can lead to system outages, service delays, or operational shutdowns.

Jason points out that Exposure Management isn’t just about closing gaps – it’s about keeping the organization moving. Continuous visibility, he explained, gives teams the awareness they need to prevent disruptions.

The cost of downtime makes this all the more real. One survey found that 90% of organizations estimate hourly IT outages cost over $300,000, with 41% reporting losses between $1 million and $5 million per hour.

9. Optimized Security Spend

Exposure Management sheds light on what tools and processes teams actually use – and which ones duplicate effort. This lets organizations redirect budget toward solutions that deliver real impact, and drop unnecessary costs.

Caleb notes that with Exposure Management, “we finally know which tools we need, and which we don’t.” Research backs this up. A 2025 study found that threat-centric prioritization frameworks helped organizations reduce urgent remediation workloads by 95%, shrinking task backlogs from roughly 16,000 items to 850, while still addressing over 85% of exploitable threats. 

10. Improved Collaboration Across Teams

Exposure Management bridges gaps between security, IT, DevOps, and Compliance by giving everyone access to the same exposure data and threat context.

Caleb captures this perfectly: “You can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t rally teams around confusion.” Studies highlight why collaboration matters. One survey found that over 1/3 of organizations that take more than 24 hours to remediate a critical vulnerability blame lack of context or accurate information for the delayed response. 

The Bottom Line

Although benefits surface far sooner, a year in is a great benchmark for quantifying the value of Exposure Management. The rollout is done, the workflows are in place, and the results are clearly showing. That’s why we turned to our in-house experts to unpack what Exposure Management actually delivers after twelve months in practice.

Across every proof point, the message was consistent: teams using Exposure Management tools gain clarity, move faster, and can focus better on what actually matters. As Caleb summarized, “It’s not just about finding vulnerabilities. It’s about understanding which ones change your risk posture.”