What is attack surface management?
Attack surface management helps you find, catalog, analyze, prioritize, and monitor every potential entry point into your IT environment. These entry points — known as attack vectors — are constant targets for adversaries.
In hybrid environments across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS, managing the attack surface is more critical — and more complex — than ever. Security teams often juggle siloed tools that produce disconnected findings, making it hard to get a clear view of exposure risk.
Threat actors are always looking for gaps they can exploit to access systems, networks, applications, and data, leading to serious security and compliance setbacks. Effective attack surface management closes those gaps — helping stop breaches before they happen.
By 2029, the attack surface management market will be worth $48.4 billion, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 12.6% since 2024. This growth reflects organizations' increasing recognition that reducing exposure across their entire digital estate—spanning cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments—requires unified visibility and contextual understanding of risks.
Keep in mind that when we talk about attack surface management, we’re including both internal and external attack surface management (EASM). Basically, these terms refer to whether you’re dealing with vulnerabilities in internal or public-facing assets, respectively.
In the cloud, attack surface and exposure management are both critically important and uniquely tricky to deal with. The cloud is fast and ephemeral, which means that it’s difficult to find, map, and deal with new attack vectors. That’s why attack surface and exposure management in the cloud need to be a highly strategic and orchestrated effort, bound by a mix of great tools, frameworks, and practices.
Untangling the attack surface, attack vectors, and vulnerabilities
Before we go any further, let’s quickly differentiate and define some important terms in attack surface management:
Attack surface refers to the cumulative total of all attack vectors in your IT environments.
Attack vectors are pathways or methods that adversaries can use to break into your cloud estate.
Vulnerabilities refer to specific flaws in assets and resources that make up your overall attack surface.
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What does an organization’s attack surface look like?
If you’re like the vast majority of enterprises, the cloud is the backbone of your IT architecture. An organization's attack surface is the sprawl of open APIs, cloud servers, employee devices, and employees who might fall for a scam email. These different digital, physical, and human elements constantly shift, creating potential weak spots. To build a solid attack surface management program, you first need to understand the three main types of attack surfaces and how they overlap:
Digital attack surface: In cloud environments, the digital attack surface typically constitutes the largest portion of the overall attack surface. The digital attack surface is made up of various flaws, bugs, and misconfigurations like poor access controls or data exposure across cloud assets. By cloud assets, we mean users, data, APIs, codebases, containers, AI resources, and applications. In hybrid environments, the digital attack surface extends beyond cloud to include on-premises infrastructure, creating potential visibility gaps that attackers can exploit when security tools operate in silos.
Physical attack surface: With the physical attack surface, we’re talking about any endpoint that’s connected to your network. Think desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, IoT machinery, hard drives, and servers.
Social engineering attack surface: Because of the rise in attack techniques like phishing, you have to protect employees from any psychological manipulation that could lead adversaries to sensitive data. This makes up your social engineering attack surface. When the social engineering attack surface is breached, things can go south quickly. Check out the Semrush Google Ads phishing campaigns for proof.
A comprehensive guide to the attack surface management lifecycle
Now that we’ve covered the basics of attack surface management, it’s time to put theory into action. Here’s a framework to help strengthen every step of the attack surface management lifecycle:
Step 1: Map your attack surface
Start by scanning your entire cloud estate to build a complete inventory of your assets — everything from AI services and storage buckets to code repositories and containers. Without this foundation, it’s impossible to uncover the vulnerabilities that make up your attack surface.
In hybrid environments, this challenge grows. Assets span cloud and on-premises infrastructure, and siloed security tools often create gaps. Effective attack surface management integrates findings from scanners, SAST, DAST, and penetration tests into a single, unified view that closes those gaps.
Mapping your environment also means understanding how assets interact. Toxic combinations can amplify weaknesses and create new risks. Don’t forget people — employee identities are a critical part of your attack surface.
Step 2: Assess and classify risks and vulnerabilities
Once you have full visibility into your environment, it’s time to dig deeper. Classify vulnerabilities based on how they impact your business, focusing on those that could expose crown-jewel data. Risk-based prioritization is key.
Centralize findings from all your security tools to eliminate blind spots, normalize results, and correlate risks. Tools like Software Composition Analysis and CSPM are vital, and real-time threat intelligence helps you stay ahead of emerging cloud risks.
Step 3: Remediate and mitigate risks
At this stage, you should have a clear, prioritized list of vulnerabilities. The next step is reducing your attack surface, starting with the highest-risk items.
One major bottleneck in remediation is ownership — 80% of the time is often spent figuring out who should act. A unified platform that assigns ownership and offers clear remediation guidance can significantly lower your mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Key strategies include:
Uncovering shadow IT
Clearing redundant assets
Strengthening security policies
Consolidating tools to reduce sprawl
Addressing third-party and supply chain risks
Decommissioning end-of-life hardware securely
Training employees to recognize phishing and insider threats
Step 4: Monitor your attack surface
Cloud environments change constantly. Static scans are not enough. Adopt a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) approach — blending continuous discovery, validation, and prioritization.
Modern platforms can correlate real-time risk signals and help security teams move faster as attack surfaces evolve. With CTEM, you’ll understand the impact of every new deployment and minimize exposure before it becomes a problem.
The Relationship Between Attack Surface Management and Exposure Management
Attack surface management and exposure management are closely related but distinct security disciplines that work together to create a comprehensive security posture.
Attack surface management focuses on discovering, cataloging, and monitoring all potential entry points across your IT environment. It's about identifying what assets you have, how they're connected, and where vulnerabilities might exist.
Exposure management builds on this foundation by determining which vulnerabilities or weaknesses are actually exploitable by threat actors. It moves beyond theoretical risks to assess actual exposure by validating which attack vectors are accessible from the outside and which critical assets they could potentially compromise.
Think of attack surface management as creating the map of your territory, while exposure management identifies which areas on that map are genuinely at risk. While attack surface management gives you the complete inventory of potential weaknesses, exposure management provides the context needed to prioritize remediation based on real-world exploitability.
In modern security operations, these approaches work in tandem: comprehensive attack surface management creates visibility across your digital estate, while exposure management adds the critical context needed to focus resources where they'll have the greatest impact on reducing risk. As environments become more complex and hybrid, this unified approach becomes essential for security teams to effectively manage risk with limited resources.
Best practices to enhance your attack surface management program
Here are some recommendations that can help you immediately improve how you deal with your cloud attack surface.
Segment your cloud network
By breaking down your cloud network into smaller, isolated components, you’ll reduce the possibility of lateral movement for threat actors, even if they manage to sneak through one of your attack vectors. If needed, you can even set up specific security policies for each component. Beyond granular segmentation, it’s also a good idea to install firewalls and virtual local area networks (VLANs).
Expand visibility across hybrid and SaaS environments
Many organizations monitor only cloud workloads, but attackers target weak spots across your full digital footprint. Integrate findings from on-prem systems and SaaS platforms into a single view to eliminate blind spots and reduce redundant tooling. This also simplifies reporting and boosts ROI on your existing security investments.
Adopt zero-trust principles
In perimeterless cloud architectures, you need perimeterless security principles. Enter zero trust. With zero-trust principles like least privilege and just-in-time access and mechanisms like multi-factor authentication, you can reinforce your entire security posture and cut down the number of attack vectors an adversary can potentially exploit.
Simplify your architecture
The more convoluted your IT architecture is, the harder it’s going to be to track and reduce your attack surface. A few simple steps you can take are getting rid of siloed tools, establishing an allowlist of applications and resources, deleting dormant digital identities with access privileges, and limiting the number of endpoints connected to the cloud network.
Emphasize training and awareness
One of the easiest ways you can proactively improve your attack surface management program is by engaging your employees. Teach them about new cloud risks, and provide them with tools, skills, and capabilities to mitigate risks, address vulnerabilities, and identify signs of social engineering attacks on their own.
Commission a comprehensive CNAPP solution
To deal with cloud risks, you need a cloud security tool. That doesn’t mean shoehorning a legacy security tool in your cloud; it means introducing a tool that was built to deal with cloud risks. A strong CNAPP solution has everything you need to keep your attack surface to a minimum. We’re talking about a unified platform with CIEM, DSPM, AI-SPM, CSPM, and vulnerability management features.
Lastly, a pro tip: Always go for an agentless solution because it’s the quickest, most lightweight way to achieve comprehensive visibility across your cloud attack surface.
How Wiz Cloud can support your attack surface management program
If you’re looking for a tool to minimize your attack surface, secure your multi-cloud operations, democratize security capabilities, and drive cloud performance, look no further than Wiz Cloud.
Wiz Cloud is purpose-built to minimize your attack surface and help your security and development teams focus on real risks. With agentless visibility and an industry-leading Security Graph, Wiz creates a visual map of your entire cloud environment—connecting workloads, data, configurations, identities, and exposures into a single context-rich view.
Wiz Cloud's Security Graph creates a visual representation of your entire attack surface, mapping relationships among assets, vulnerabilities, and potential attack paths to provide an understanding of contextual risk that traditional tools cannot match.
You can integrate findings from vulnerability scanners, code analysis tools, and external pen tests into Wiz—correlating them with cloud context to understand which exposures truly pose a risk. Ownership assignment and workflow automation allow teams to collaborate more effectively and remediate issues faster.
Get a demo now to see Wiz Cloud in action.
