What are the metrics on exposure management do you think are most important for the business? I started my career as Vulnerability Management practitioner and have seen the technology and market evolve from VA to VM to RBVM to CTEM now. Yet, VM platforms still haven't solved how to report VM to the senior management effectively, most of them reporting compliance only. The value prop of VM is changing from compliance to exposure management, and exposure reporting is still not easy.  I was speaking to a fellow CISO who measured the exposure by the number of chatter on Dark Web and showed the progress in 1 year, which decreased drastically after a year due to their efforts. What do you think?

Thanks a great insight Prateek, and you are correct vulnerability management has evolved but reporting still often stops at compliance. What matters most to senior leadership is exposure in business terms therefore the key metrics should be the following:
-Attackability prioritization: focus on what’s actually exploitable.
-Response speed: Mean Time to Vulnerability Response (MTVR).
-Financial impact: quantified risk trend (ALE reduction).
-Critical remediation: time to resolve by severity and asset value.
-Risk concentration: percentage of exposures clustered on key assets.
-Business mapping: link exposures to core operations or revenue.
These metrics move the conversation from counting CVEs to showing how exposure reduction improves resilience and protects business outcomes.

It's a great discussion, and here are my two cents on where we need to focus: moving beyond a vulnerability's existence to its exploitability. The core challenge is transforming alert volume into measurable risk containment speed by integrating advanced technical context with financial reporting.

High-Value Exposure Management Metrics
1. Prioritization by Confirmed Attackability
The Approach: The challenge of "1000s of alerts" is solved by filtering. Use Runtime Analysis (and/or SBOMs) to confirm an exposure's Attackability—i.e., is the vulnerable component actually called in production?
The Metric: Report the Percentage of Critical Risk Filtered by Unattackability to prove resource efficiency and prioritization effectiveness.

2. Mean Time to Vulnerability Response (MTVR)
The Approach: We must evolve Time to Remediate to reflect faster risk containment. Response includes patching and active mitigation (WAF rule, network segmentation), which validates Control Effectiveness.
The Metric: MTVR for exposures tied to the CISA KEV list. This demonstrates speed and action against the most pressing threats, aligning with new regulatory pressures.

3. Quantified Financial Risk Trend
The Approach: For the board, integrate External Signals (chatter, KEV) with a financial risk model like CyberRisk FAIR.
The Metric: Probable Reduction in Annualized Loss Exposure (ALE). This is the ultimate metric for justifying investment and quantifying financial benefits.

Great question, Prateek. You are right that vulnerability management metrics have long been compliance-driven, and shifting to true exposure management requires reframing what we measure. A few metrics I’ve found resonate well with senior management:
- Time to remediate by criticality: not just patch SLAs but how quickly high risk exposures tied to business critical assets are reduced.
- Exposure concentration: measuring the percentage of critical systems carrying a disproportionate share of vulnerabilities helps illustrate systemic risk.
- Business impact mapping: linking exposures directly to applications or services that generate revenue or support core operations. This shifts the conversation from “number of CVEs” to “risk to business outcomes.”
- Control effectiveness: measuring how often existing controls (mitigating controls, WAF, DDoS protections etc.) actually reduce exploitable paths.
- External signals: such as Dark Web chatter or exploit availability but combind with internal telemetry to avoid sounding only reactive.

The key is translating technical exposure into risk lang. which the the board understands such as how exposure is trending, how it maps to critical assets and how quickly we can contain it. That’s when metrics move from compliance to meaningful sr. Leadership support.