**Maximizing ROI in Cybersecurity Attack Surface Management**
**Introduction**
You’re investing more time and money than ever into cybersecurity—and still wondering if it’s enough. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Attack surface management (ASM) has become a top priority for CISOs and security leaders as organizations rapidly adopt cloud tools, remote work practices, and increasingly complex digital ecosystems. But is your ASM program actually delivering a return on investment (ROI)?
According to a recent article on The Hacker News, titled [“The ROI Problem in Attack Surface Management”](https://thehackernews.com/2026/01/the-roi-problem-in-attack-surface.html), organizations face a growing gap between the cost of managing their digital footprint and the measurable impact of their efforts. The article highlights that without clear metrics, automation, and contextual visibility, ASM can become a black hole of budget and effort rather than a strategic asset.
In this post, we’ll dive into practical ways you can maximize ROI in attack surface management by focusing on:
– Aligning ASM with business value
– Integrating tools and teams for better visibility
– Streamlining remediation through prioritization
Let’s look at how security leaders can take control of their attack surface strategy to drive measurable results.
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**Align ASM with Business-Driven Goals**
One of the reasons attack surface management efforts stall is misalignment between security operations and business objectives. Simply identifying every exposed asset isn’t enough—CISOs need a way to evaluate which exposures actually matter to business-critical systems.
**Here’s how you can link ASM to business ROI:**
– **Map assets to business functions.** Don’t treat all assets as equal. Prioritize visibility and protection for high-value systems such as payment processing APIs, customer databases, or executive portals.
– **Use contextual risk scoring.** Many ASM platforms can flag vulnerabilities, but a raw CVSS score doesn’t tell you if something is critical to your business. Take into account exploitability, asset importance, and exposure time.
– **Track outcomes, not activities.** Instead of reporting how many IPs or domains you scanned, focus on how many high-risk exposures you’ve resolved and how quickly.
For example, a multinational retail company integrated ASM with their enterprise architecture inventory. By tagging business units to each digital asset, the security team could prioritize fixes based on revenue impact. They reduced critical exposures by 43% in six months—not because they found more, but because they fixed the ones that mattered.
**Key stat:** A recent Ponemon Institute study found that organizations aligning security with business goals were 3.5x more likely to report confidence in their cyber investments.
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**Integrate Tools and Break Down Silos**
Even the most advanced attack surface platforms are limited without collaboration. ASM works best when it connects across your ecosystem—from vulnerability management tools to cloud platforms and DevOps teams.
**Steps to increase integration and efficiency:**
– **Sync ASM with threat intelligence and EDR.** This lets you move from asset discovery to threat validation and response faster.
– **Cross-train IT and security teams.** Help teams understand each other’s workflows so security findings don’t sit in a ticket queue for weeks. Shared context leads to faster remediation.
– **Automate asset discovery and classification.** Manually tracking domains, IPs, or SaaS usage isn’t scalable. Use automation and scheduled scans to stay current—especially in cloud environments where assets appear and disappear often.
Let’s say your DevOps team spins up a server for testing and forgets to remove it. Without an integrated ASM system, it could remain exposed with default credentials. With continuous monitoring and cross-tool visibility, these orphaned assets can be detected and flagged early.
**Key stat:** According to Gartner, by 2026, 60% of organizations will use Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS) to monitor their external attack surface—up from 20% in 2022.
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**Prioritize and Streamline Remediation**
Most companies have more exposures than they can handle. The difference between organizations that improve security posture and those that don’t? Prioritization.
**Here’s how to focus on impact:**
– **Adopt a risk-based remediation strategy.** Not everything needs an immediate fix. Rank vulnerabilities by business impact, exploit availability, and exposure level.
– **Automate common fixes.** For known misconfigurations or CVEs, use orchestration tools to automate patches or shutdowns.
– **Create remediation SLAs.** Work with business and IT stakeholders to establish response timelines based on severity levels.
One healthcare provider used contextual risk scoring to prioritize exposure fixes. By resolving the top 10% of critical findings, they reduced incident response time by 52% and avoided several near-missed breaches over 12 months.
With limited resources, it’s vital that you don’t measure ASM success by how many issues you find—but by how many high-risk issues you’ve fixed, fast.
**Key stat:** A Cyentia Institute report revealed that addressing just 10% of high-value vulnerabilities can eliminate over 90% of actual breach risk.
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**Conclusion**
Maximizing ROI in cybersecurity, especially within attack surface management, isn’t just about buying the best tools—it’s about making informed, prioritized decisions that align with your organization’s true risk posture and business priorities.
The core message is simple: ASM needs to move from being a technical visibility problem to a business-enabling strategy. When you align efforts to business impact, integrate across teams, and prioritize actions by value, you move from reactive firefighting to proactive risk reduction.
If you’re not already doing so, now’s the time to review your current ASM approach and ask the hard questions: Are we fixing what matters? Are we investing effort where it counts? Is our security program driving measurable value?
You can start by:
– Mapping your assets to business functions
– Reviewing integration across your security ecosystem
– Setting risk-based priorities with clear SLAs
Don’t let your ASM strategy become another unmeasured checkbox. Make it a core part of your cybersecurity ROI.
For more insights, check out the original source article on The Hacker News: [The ROI Problem in Attack Surface Management](https://thehackernews.com/2026/01/the-roi-problem-in-attack-surface.html).
Let’s turn visibility into value—starting today.
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