Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Recently, industry analyst Jon Oltsik outlined a critical shift underway in cybersecurity: the move toward a threat-informed defense. As Oltsik describes, organizations are beginning to strengthen the intersection of vulnerability scanning and threat intelligence, using AI to bolster asset classification and risk scoring. This evolution is essential as enterprises seek to move beyond fragmented security practices and build a more cohesive exposure management strategy.

In our recent article on Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), we highlighted how exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) like Nucleus can support several critical phases of the CTEM framework. In that article, we intentionally separated the scoping step from the other technology-dependent CTEM stages. Scoping begins as a business- and process-driven exercise. However, doing scoping well and at scale relies more on having the right technology.

All the major vulnerability scanning vendors have strengths, but asset tracking isn’t one of them. Some workarounds exist. However, if you are using one of the most popular vulnerability scanning tools, it’s likely you will struggle with asset tracking.

Traditional vulnerability management is broken. It is ineffective. The process of scanning for software vulnerabilities, prioritizing based on CVSS scores, and fixing what you can has become an endless patch cycle. The need for a better approach is clear. Different scanning tools are creating millions of alerts, obscuring critical risks within the noise. Organizations need to go beyond finding and patching vulnerabilities and opt in to a more effective approach to managing exposures.

Every day, security teams are expected to manage risks in cloud environments that they don’t fully control, can’t always see, and that are constantly changing. Cloud-native assets—such as container workloads, autoscaling groups, and serverless functions—are highly dynamic, appearing, disappearing, and evolving in response to demand and functionality changes.

Measuring enterprise risk posture—its overall security readiness and resilience—is a complex challenge. Advanced security solutions, such as automated vulnerability management tools and unified risk dashboards, enable organizations to defend their networks with unprecedented efficiency. The rapid expansion of cloud environments and the intricacies of modern IT infrastructures, however, present an increasingly dynamic attack surface.

For many security professionals, managing asset visibility feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. They are stuck in what experts call the “swivel chair approach”—constantly pivoting between multiple dashboards, spreadsheets, and security tools to manually stitch together an understanding of their risk landscape.

The question of ownership is one of the biggest reasons vulnerabilities persist in organizations far longer than they should. Who owns vulnerabilities? This isn’t just a theoretical debate—it’s a critical operational issue. Modern scanning solutions excel at identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities, but without clear ownership, those vulnerabilities often linger unaddressed or improperly documented, increasing an organization’s risk exposure.

If you read the newest risk-based vulnerability management literature, it appears we have a new favorite punching bag: the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). You seemingly can’t throw a rock into the “vuln-o-sphere” without hitting someone dunking on CVSS or the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The argument goes something like this: “Exploitation rates are up, ransomware is surging, and vulnerabilities are multiplying like rabbits.