Shift from Reactive to Proactive: Leveraging Tenable Exposure Management for MSSP Success

An Exposure Management as a Service offering allows MSSPs to unify security visibility, insight and action across the attack surface to prioritize exposure and enable innovation that is secure and compliant. Whether you’re already leveraging Tenable Vulnerability Management as a Service or you’re just starting a service offering, we’ve got guidance for you.

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) grapple with unique challenges while protecting their clients from sophisticated cyber attacks. They’re often caught in a reactive cycle of defending organizations from incidents, leaving very little bandwidth to pursue a preventive approach. Visibility into the full breadth and depth of a client’s attack surface can be a challenge due to the siloed nature of commonly used security tools. And they may find themselves drowning in alerts and data without an effective way to analyze and prioritize actions. 

By adopting an adaptive and innovative technology such as exposure management powered by the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, MSSPs can enhance their service offerings, delivering more effective and streamlined cybersecurity outcomes for their clients. 

Exposure Management as a Service (EMaaS) is a strategic approach that unifies visibility, prioritization and remediation across a client’s entire attack surface. By leading with EMaaS powered by Tenable, MSSPs can differentiate their offerings, drive client value and maximize ROI. This blog explores why EMaaS should be at the forefront of your service portfolio. It includes guidance for MSSPs who are already leveraging Tenable’s Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaaS) as well as for MSSPs who are starting a new cybersecurity service.

Why should MSSPs lead with Exposure Management as a Service?

Cyber exposures include vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations in cloud and on prem assets, as well as weak human and non-human identities with excessive permissions. Attackers can exploit these exposures to move laterally within an organization, leveraging IT, OT, IoT, cloud, identities and applications.

Traditional siloed security tools make it virtually impossible to obtain the holistic view of an environment that an attacker sees. Without a contextual view, it’s difficult to effectively prioritize and optimize remediation efforts. These factors not only increase cost but also strain the resources within your Security Operations Center (SOC). Exposure management addresses this by providing a holistic view of risks, enabling organizations to take proactive measures to remediate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations so they can prevent attacks before they happen.

For MSSPs, leading with EMaaS means they shift from reactive services to proactive risk reduction by bridging the gap between exposure management and breach management. They can guide customers in investing in effective security measures that prevent breaches, cementing their role as trusted allies in the fight against cyber threats.

The Tenable One Exposure Management Platform is an AI-powered solution that consolidates data from the various tools you already use as part of your MSSP offering, including vulnerability management, cloud security, endpoint security, OT/IoT security, application security, CMDBs and more — alongside your native Tenable findings. With pre-built connectors, the platform ingests asset data and associated weaknesses from across your technology ecosystem to:

• Centralize risk data for complete, contextualized visibility.
• Reveal hidden relationships between vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and entitlements, and to expose toxic risk combinations.
• Identify remediation choke points that, if addressed, can dramatically reduce overall business risk.

Ultimately, Tenable One powered proactive exposure management  helps MSSPs to differentiate services and drive risk reduction.

Key benefits of Tenable One include:

• Unified visibility: A single pane of glass for all assets and risks reduces blind spots by up to 10x.
• Unified insights: AI-driven models like Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) provide critical context so your teams can focus on the most exploitable risks, cutting remediation tickets significantly.
• Attack path analysis: Maps relationships across domains to block critical paths, aligned with frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to identify remediation choke points that, if addressed, can dramatically reduce overall business risk.
• Exposure signals: Gain visibility into your customer’s most critical risk scenarios so you can identify security control gaps and create custom exposure signals to view business-specific risks and weaknesses.
• Business-aligned reporting: Pre-built and custom dashboards and advanced analytics allow you to communicate cyber risk in business terms that your clients’ executives can understand.

By leading with EMaaS, MSSPs can architect high-performance, risk-based processes built on best practices. Learn more about partnering with us through Tenable's MSSP program.

Launching a new Exposure Management as a Service offering with Tenable

If you’re just entering the MSSP market, or are diversifying your portfolio, starting with EMaaS using Tenable One gives you a competitive edge from day one. Tenable One empowers you to help organizations secure the attack surface beyond traditional IT, including cloud infrastructure, identity, OT and AI, to deliver scalable, high-impact services while eliminating tool fragmentation risks.

Benefits include:

• Quick time-to-value: Tenable's MSSP program provides best practices for implementing risk-based processes, helping you go to market faster. Advanced features in our MSSP portal, such as creating evaluations, self provisioning and robust role-based access control (RBAC) reduces time to onboard customers and shortens billing cycles.
• Scalability and customization: Use pre-built and custom dashboards, APIs and mappings to tailor services for multi-tenant environments, ensuring client data isolation while scaling normalization.
• Differentiation through innovation: Incorporate Tenable AI Exposure into your MSSP offering to secure your customers from emerging AI threats. Key components such as AI Discovery, AI-security posture management (SPM) and AI policy enforcements address internal threats such as user AI interactions, unsanctioned AI usage and sensitive data leakage — setting your service apart.

By starting with EMaaS, MSSPs can position business growth, attracting clients seeking advanced, unified protection.

Evolving from existing Tenable VMaaS to EMaaS

If you're already offering Tenable VMaaS built on Tenable Vulnerability Management, transitioning to EMaaS is a seamless evolution. VMaaS excels at identifying and managing vulnerabilities in traditional IT environments. EMaaS expands this to a broader exposure management framework via Tenable One, with additional capabilities like Tenable Attack Surface Management, Tenable Identity Exposure, Tenable Cloud Security and Tenable AI Exposure.

Benefits include:

• Build on your foundation: You can leverage your current Tenable investments to add additional capabilities as part of service enhancements. For instance, you can integrate third-party data through AI-powered connectors for a unified view, maintaining client separation with the multi-tenanted Tenable MSSP portal.
• Enhance efficiency: Reduce manual efforts with automated workflows and generative AI recommendations for faster analysis and remediation.
• Drive cross-sell opportunities: Expanding from vulnerability management to exposure management with Tenable product upgrades helps you deliver expert-led services that significantly improve your clients’ security posture, meet compliance requirements and reduce cyber insurance.
• Outcome-based impact: You can offer EMaaS tiers to your existing clients, demonstrating value through consolidation, reduced licensing costs and faster business outcomes.

This progression allows you to increase ROI on your services by unlocking new revenue streams with an enhanced and scalable service offering. A Tenable MSSP partnership empowers you to deliver comprehensive cyber risk management outcomes that improve customer satisfaction — and we all know that happy customers are the best way to improve your profit margins.

In summary

If you are overwhelmed by siloed security tooling and threat alert fatigue and find it challenging to move from reactive to proactive cybersecurity, Tenable can help. MSSPs that lead with EMaaS using Tenable will thrive. Whether evolving from VMaaS to EMaaS or launching a new EMaaS offering, Tenable One empowers you to deliver unparalleled value through proactive exposure management. This results in stronger client relationships, operational efficiencies and a robust competitive advantage.

Ready to revolutionize your offerings? Explore Tenable's MSSP program today and start showcasing how exposure management can benefit your customers.

Want to learn more? Watch the video below: