WithSecure named A Visionary in the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms report

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

Gartner has published its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms — and named WithSecure a Visionary. WithSecure is the only European vendor included in the report.

This is a new market category, and being recognized at its inception matters. It reflects not just product maturity, but a deliberate strategic bet that WithSecure made years before the category had a name.

A new category with a clear purpose

For decades, cybersecurity operated in reaction mode: patch vulnerabilities after they’re discovered, respond after malware hits, investigate after a breach. Traditional vulnerability scanners helped — but they produced long lists with little prioritization, siloed by tool and team, and rarely gave a complete picture of an organization’s real exposure.

The problem compounded as IT environments grew more complex. Cloud infrastructure, hybrid work, SaaS applications, third-party identities — the attack surface expanded well beyond what any single scanner was designed to cover. Managing vulnerabilities in isolation wasn’t enough anymore.

Gartner recognized this shift by first introducing the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, and then formalizing a new technology category: Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP). The direction, as Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2025 described it, is a shift from siloed vulnerability assessment tools toward unified platforms that bring together attack surface management, AI-powered prioritization, and adversarial exposure validation in one place.

The 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ defines EAPs as platforms that

In plain terms: instead of generating lists of problems, these platforms help organizations understand which exposures actually matter — and what to fix first.

WithSecure’s position: Visionary, and sole European vendor

WithSecure was named a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms. Earlier in 2025, WithSecure was also included as one of 10 Sample Vendors in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Security Operations — the only European vendor in that list.

That capability — using AI-based attack path simulation to proactively hunt for exposures the way an attacker would — is central to how WithSecure approaches exposure management. It’s not a bolt-on feature. It’s built into the architecture of Elements Exposure Management.

How WithSecure thinks about exposure management

WithSecure’s approach is built around three steps that map closely to how Gartner defines the EAP category:

1. Discover — Continuous, comprehensive discovery of attack surfaces: known assets, unknown assets, cloud environments, identities, unmanaged endpoints including IoT devices, and external-facing infrastructure. Modern attack perimeters extend well beyond the corporate network, and exposure management has to reflect that.
2. Prioritize — Not all exposures are equal. Elements Exposure Management consolidates findings and prioritizes them based on severity, asset criticality, business impact, likelihood of exploitation, and the context of existing security controls. This is where the AI-based attack path simulation does its most important work — surfacing the exposures that a real attacker would most likely target, not just the ones with the highest CVE score.
3. Act — Results surface in a central location with risk scoring, remediation tracking, and clear visualizations including attack path mapping. The goal is to reduce the operational burden on already stretched IT and security teams, not add to it.

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.

Why proactive security is no longer optional

Gartner’s research points in a clear direction: by 2028, adversarial exposure validation capabilities that simulate live attack scenarios will become accepted alternatives to traditional penetration testing required by regulatory frameworks.

For organizations already navigating NIS2, DORA, and other European regulatory requirements, that trajectory matters. Manual, point-in-time penetration testing is expensive, infrequent, and increasingly insufficient for demonstrating continuous security assurance. Continuous, automated exposure validation is the more practical path forward — particularly for mid-sized organizations without the budget or internal expertise to run regular pen testing programs.

WithSecure Elements Exposure Management was designed with this in mind: to let organizations see their attack surface through the lens of a cybercriminal — where the weakest points are, how a breach could unfold, and what needs to be fixed first. Security teams that are stretched thin can focus resources on the exposures that are actually exploitable, rather than working through compliance checklists that may not reflect real-world risk.

Two Magic Quadrants. One platform.

WithSecure is one of very few vendors recognized in both the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms and the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms. We believe that organizations choosing a security platform that spans both disciplines are making the more future-proof investment — as these capabilities converge, managing them through separate, disconnected products will create the same complexity and coverage gaps that fragmented security stacks have always created.

WithSecure Elements covers endpoint protection, detection and response, and exposure management on a single cloud-native platform — designed for mid-sized organizations and the MSPs that serve them.

Explore WithSecure™ Elements Exposure Management (XM) and request a free 30-day trial to discover how you can proactively protect your company’s assets and operations: 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.
⁴⁾ Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms. Evgeny Mirolyubov, Franz Hinner, Deepak Mishra. 14 July 2025.

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