What is attack surface management?
Attack Surface Management is the discipline of continuously discovering and monitoring everything your organization exposes to the public internet. At its core, ASM answers a simple but high-stakes question: “What can an attacker see?”
In modern cloud environments, that question is surprisingly hard to answer. Teams ship new services daily, identities proliferate across SaaS and cloud providers, and shadow IT pops up faster than centralized teams can track. ASM approaches this from the attacker’s angle — the outside-in — to surface assets and exposures that traditional inventory or vulnerability tools never touch.
Classic examples include long-forgotten dev servers, test environments promoted to production without review, public storage buckets, or assets inherited through acquisitions. But the cloud adds more subtle issues: ephemeral services, API gateways, exposed functions, orphaned IPs, or misconfigured networking rules that unintentionally create external entry points.
Modern ASM aims to detect these blind spots before adversaries do. It operates like a continuously running external sensor for your organization, watching for new assets and exposures as infrastructure shifts.
What ASM brings to the table
External asset discovery: Catalogs every internet-facing domain, IP, certificate, and cloud service — including the ones no one knew were deployed.
Exposure validation: Confirms what’s truly reachable from the internet, filtering out false positives.
Risk awareness: Prioritizes exposures based on the importance of the asset and what it connects to.
Continuous monitoring: Tracks changes to your external footprint in near-real time as cloud resources appear, disappear, or drift.
Where modern ASM is evolving
Traditional ASM stops at discovery. Modern ASM goes further by correlating external exposures with internal cloud context — identities, data, permissions, and network paths. Knowing that something is exposed is useful; knowing whether that exposure leads directly to sensitive data or powerful privileges is transformative.
That’s why the industry is shifting toward ASM approaches that pair outside-in visibility with inside-out understanding. It’s the only way to distinguish minor internet exposure from a real attack path.
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Why context matters in modern attack surface management
Most organizations stop at discovery — they build a list of exposed assets and vulnerabilities and assume that’s enough to understand risk. In reality, exposure alone rarely tells you whether something is dangerous. Context does.
Modern adversaries don’t exploit vulnerabilities at random. They exploit paths: the chain of identities, permissions, misconfigurations, and data access that turns a single exposed asset into an entry point with real blast radius. That’s why the most forward-leaning security teams have shifted from thinking in lists to thinking in graphs.
A security graph connects your external exposures to the internal systems they can reach — workloads, identities, data stores, and cross-cloud relationships. When you map those relationships, the signal becomes obvious:
A forgotten dev box exposed to the internet with no permissions and no sensitive data? Likely noise.
A publicly reachable API gateway running with an IAM role that can touch production data stores? That’s an attack path, not an alert.
This shift is why traditional ASM and VM tools often miss the mark. Neither has the full picture on its own. External exposures matter most when paired with internal context. A graph makes that connection possible — it turns outside-in discovery into a representation of how your environment can actually be compromised.
By correlating exposures, identities, data sensitivity, and network paths, a graph-based model helps teams do what scanners can’t: isolate the handful of issues attackers would realistically leverage and deprioritize the rest.
It’s not about discovering more; it’s about discovering what matters.
What is unified vulnerability management?
Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) is the inside-out counterpart to ASM — but its scope extends far beyond cloud. UVM is the discipline of identifying and analyzing vulnerabilities across all the systems you run, whether they live in cloud environments, on-prem data centers, virtualized infrastructure, endpoints, containers, or even code repositories.
If ASM reveals what’s exposed from the outside, UVM shows you what’s weak everywhere else.
Traditional VM tools focused narrowly on servers and endpoints. Modern UVM reflects how organizations actually operate today: hybrid environments, mixed architectures, code deployed through pipelines, and workloads that move between cloud and non-cloud infrastructure. UVM unifies those signals so teams can understand risk across all of it — in one model.
What modern UVM covers
Modern UVM isn’t anchored to a specific environment. It can evaluate:
Cloud workloads (VMs, containers, serverless, managed services)
On-prem servers and virtual machines
Containers and images across registries
Kubernetes workloads
Code, dependencies, and supply chain components
Endpoints and traditional infrastructure
It doesn’t matter where the asset exists — only whether it’s part of your environment.
What UVM actually does
Centralizes vulnerability signals from cloud APIs, agentless scans, agents, CI pipelines, and code analysis into one system
Builds a unified inventory across cloud, on-prem, and containerized environments
Correlates related weaknesses to show blast radius across all environments
Supports compliance evidence for frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS
Feeds remediation workflows regardless of where the asset lives
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How UVM differs from ASM
Where ASM discovers new and unknown assets, UVM evaluates the systems you already operate — regardless of infrastructure. It performs deep analysis using authenticated scans, cloud metadata, and code signals that external scanning simply cannot see.
Together, they give you a full-spectrum view:
ASM → outside-in
UVM → inside-out across cloud and non-cloud environments
Why this matters now
Modern attack paths don’t respect cloud vs. on-prem boundaries. An external exposure may lead into a cloud workload, which may have a vulnerable container image, which may run with an over-permissive identity that reaches into an on-prem database.
Without a unified vulnerability layer across all environments, none of that context is visible — and prioritization becomes guesswork.
Key differences between attack surface management and unified vulnerability management
ASM and UVM approach risk from opposite directions, and that’s exactly why organizations need both. They answer different questions, operate on different data, and uncover different types of blind spots.
ASM shows you what’s exposed externally.
UVM shows you what’s vulnerable internally.
Understanding risk requires both perspectives together.
Perspective: Outside-in vs. inside-out
ASM looks at your environment the way an attacker would — from the public internet inward. It reveals unknown assets, shadow IT, and unintended exposures.
UVM analyzes systems from the defender’s vantage point — authenticated access, configuration data, packages, identities, and dependencies.
This dual perspective creates a complete view of where attackers can enter — and what they can do once inside.
Asset scope: Unknown external vs. known internal
ASM uncovers assets you didn’t know existed or didn’t realize were exposed.
UVM evaluates assets you already manage across cloud, on-prem, containers, and workloads.
ASM expands your inventory; UVM deepens your understanding of it.
Primary focus: Exposure vs. vulnerability
ASM identifies exposure points — public endpoints, reachable services, externally visible misconfigurations.
UVM identifies weaknesses in software, configurations, identities, and dependencies.
Exposure reveals where attackers can reach. Vulnerabilities reveal what they can exploit.
Scanning method: Non-credentialed vs. credentialed
ASM relies on external scanning and reconnaissance techniques.
UVM uses authenticated scans, API-based analysis, and deeper inspection of software and configuration layers.
Together, they provide both breadth and depth.
Outcomes: Blind spot elimination vs. weakness remediation
ASM eliminates visibility gaps by finding assets that slip through traditional discovery processes.
UVM enables teams to remediate weaknesses with evidence, ownership, and workflow.
The real power emerges when the two feed into a unified risk model — when an exposed asset with a vulnerability, excessive permissions, and sensitive data access becomes a single, prioritized issue.
How attack surface management and unified vulnerability management work together
ASM and UVM illuminate different parts of the same problem. Viewed independently, each provides valuable insights — but neither can show you how an attacker would actually compromise your environment.
When combined, they create something far more powerful: a unified picture of real, exploitable risk.
Two complementary perspectives on the same attack path
ASM uncovers the services, endpoints, and cloud resources exposed to the public internet — including the ones nobody realized were there.
UVM uncovers the weaknesses inside those systems — vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, over-permissive identities, and insecure dependencies.
Attackers don’t care which tool category uncovered which piece. They care about the intersection: an exposed asset with a weakness that grants access to something valuable.
Why visibility must converge
Most breaches follow the same pattern:
Find something exposed.
Exploit something vulnerable.
Move laterally toward valuable data or privileged identities.
ASM is excellent at illuminating step 1. UVM is excellent at illuminating step 2. But neither, on its own, can tell you whether step 3 is even possible.
That’s why modern programs bring exposure data and vulnerability data together — so teams can understand which issues actually form a viable attack path.
Context transforms these signals into risk
When ASM and UVM run in separate silos, you get two long lists of findings that don’t inform each other. When unified, you instead get answers to questions that matter:
Is this vulnerable asset exposed to the internet?
Does this externally reachable resource have an exploitable weakness?
What identities, data stores, or internal services could it reach?
Is this combination part of a realistic attack path?
This is where the noise falls away. A “medium” vulnerability becomes critical when paired with external exposure and privileged access. A “critical” vulnerability might be deprioritized because it’s isolated and unreachable.
Operational impact: one model, one owner, one backlog
The advantage isn’t just better prioritization — it’s cleaner execution.
With unified context:
Findings can be automatically matched to the right owners
Duplicate tickets disappear
Service teams get a single, contextualized story (“this exposure + this vulnerability + these permissions”)
Security teams measure real reduction in attack paths, not just vulnerability counts
It reframes security work from patching arbitrary CVEs to disrupting attack paths before attackers can use them.
How Wiz unifies ASM and UVM
Most teams treat ASM and UVM as separate tools: one finds what’s exposed, the other finds what’s vulnerable. The problem is that real attacks don’t care about those boundaries — they exploit the combination.
Wiz brings both views together in one place. ASM reveals your internet-facing assets, and Wiz’s unified vulnerability analysis shows what weaknesses sit behind them across cloud, containers, on-prem, and code. The Security Graph ties it all together so you can see which exposures, vulnerabilities, identities, and data actually form attack paths — and which ones don’t matter.
The result is simple: One model. One prioritized backlog. One place to fix what attackers would target first.
If you want to see how this works in your environment, schedule a 1-on-1 demo.
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