WithSecure’s take on the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms report

Gartner® published its first Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms in November 2025 and named WithSecure a Visionary in the report.⁽¹ In this article, we explore the new market category from WithSecure’s perspective.

Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP) is one of the categories featured in Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2025, published in June 2025. WithSecure was included as one of 10 Sample Vendors in that category, and we are proud to be the sole European vendor included in the report for this new market category.⁽²

During the last couple of years some cyber security vendors identified the shift and started to innovate, and a new category was born to improve prioritization and asset visibility across many attack surfaces, and manage exposures with proactive, comprehensive and continuous approach. Many previously disparate products started to consolidate into one unified platform to manage exposures, and Gartner first recognized this shift by introducing Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), followed by a new technology category called Exposure Assessment Platforms (AEP).

The Gartner Hype Cycle report⁽² provided a great overview of the EAP catagory: Exposure assessment platforms have emerged from the convergence of several technologies. Vulnerability assessment tools have incorporated attack surface management (ASM) capabilities, while ASM tools are now aggregating data from a broader range of sources. Additionally, attack simulation tools are expanding their functionality to include ASM features. They are designed to enhance visibility by enumerating and prioritizing exposures such as vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across multiple asset classes and attack surfaces. While EAPs can be used in conjunction with vulnerability assessment solutions, they can also replace the numerous vulnerability scanners organizations may have, limiting technology sprawl. Today, many EAP solutions already include some variation of CAASM, EASM and automated security control assessment (ASCA) functionality."

The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms⁽¹ provided additional detail:

"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."

Our earlier blog article discussed how cyber security should be approached from the attacker’s lens instead of operating in reaction mode by patching holes after the breach, responding after the malware hits, and scrambling post-incident. The shift from reactive to proactive cybersecurity has long been a priority for security professionals, but satisfactory solutions have been in short supply.

In today’s digital age, businesses face an ever evolving threat landscape, with new vulnerabilities emerging constantly, especially with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabling new types of cyber attacks. Organizations also have increasingly hybrid environments with unclear borders. The challenge is not only to protect the systems and data within these borders but also safeguard business continuity against external threats, like digital supply chain compromises.

For decades, traditional vulnerability scanners helped individual team members to come up with a long list of vulnerabilities. Commonly network vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations were identified with their own dedicated tools generating their own vulnerability lists. The prioritization was a highly manual task and scattered across multiple lists. A new category was needed since managing vulnerabilities isn’t enough anymore. A proactive, more comprehensive and continuous approach was needed for gaining better visibility and comprehensive risk management across attack surfaces. Since IT and security teams are commonly over-loaded and under-resourced when managing all the tools they currently have, they also needed a solution that covers all the attack surface without adding any extra work, even better if their workload would be reduced.

“Through 2028, adversarial exposure validation capabilities that simulate live attack scenarios will become accepted alternatives to traditional penetration testing exercises required by regulatory frameworks.”

– Gartner⁽³

Modern IT environments are rapidly expanding the attack surfaces beyond the organization’s own perimeter, and External Attack Surface Management (EASM) are not designed to cover that all. At WithSecure, we consider the modern attack perimeter to include cloud-based email, collaboration, file storages, and many business applications that are not covered by traditional approaches. For example, cloud platforms and identities are becoming critical assets to be managed as part of modern attack surfaces. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) are some of the key “xSPMs”, or extended Security Posture Management solutions, that are becoming critical for managing organizations’ exposures. At WithSecure we call this category simply Exposure Management, uniquely including adversarial exposure validation with proprietary AI-based attack path simulation technologies.

We believe that WithSecure’s Discover – Prioritize – Act approach is well aligned with three steps of Exposure Assessment Platforms described by Gartner⁽¹

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

On the video below, WithSecure’s Mika Lindroos talks about how WithSecure uses its patent-pending AI-based attack path simulation technologies for heuristic exposure hunting and adversarial exposure validation, and helping organizations easily discover, prioritize, and act on exposures.

WithSecure continues to be very ambitious and driven to provide the best security outcomes with technology and co-security services that benefit our mid-market customers and managed service providers.  

WithSecure Elements Exposure Management was designed to allow companies to see their attack surface through the lens of a cyber criminal: where the weakest points are, how a breach could unfold, and what should be fixed first. This prioritization is key in a landscape where security teams are stretched thin. Resources can be focused on the most exploitable weaknesses, not just on ticking compliance checklists. This is a turning point. By adopting attacker-focused tools and combining them with proactive simulation, companies can begin to anticipate rather than react.

“We believe being a Visionary is result of our innovative approach, like patent pending heuristic exposure hunting as a native Adversarial Exposure Validation capability.” 

– Nina Laaksonen, Chief Product Officer, WithSecure

You can learn more about how you can continuously and proactively predict and prevent breaches against your company’s assets and business operations by using WithSecure™ Elements Exposure Management (XM) solution at www.withsecure.com/xm.

¹⁾ Gartner Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms. Mitchell Schneider, Dhivya Poole, Jonathan Nunez, 10 November 2025.

²⁾ Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2025. Jonathan Nunez, Darren Livingstone, 23 June 2025.

³⁾ Gartner How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024.

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