September 9, 2025

5 Min Read

A disjointed approach to cloud security generates more noise than clarity, making it hard for you to prioritize what to fix first. Learn how Tenable dissolves this challenge by integrating cloud security into a unified exposure management platform – giving you the context to pinpoint your organization’s biggest cyber risks.

Don't just manage cloud security – understand your true exposure. 

In today’s complex, multi-cloud world, the more tools security teams deploy, the more fragmented their understanding of cyber risk becomes. 

Organizations have wares for detecting and managing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity threats, data exposures – you name it. And I’m sure you already guessed what happens next: These products rarely play well with each other. 

The result? Tool sprawl that inflates security budgets, creates operational friction, worsens alert fatigue and gums up risk prioritization. 

Cyber teams – security operations, cloud security, DevSecOps, and governance, risk and compliance – end up working in silos, looking at separate dashboards fed by disparate data sources.

When presented with a smorgasbord of reports, each offering a fragment of the organization’s cyber exposure, CISOs struggle to answer the fundamental question: “What should we fix first?” 

To answer this question, organizations with hybrid and multi-cloud environments must move beyond isolated point products and embrace a unified, ecosystem-wide view of cyber risk.

Read on to learn how you can achieve this with Tenable Cloud Security, a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP), integrated with the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform.

The cost of a splintered security strategy

A fragmented security approach has concrete consequences.

• Jumbled risk signals: When your cloud security tool can't correlate a critical vulnerability with an over-permissioned identity in a public-facing asset, you miss the full picture of a potential attack path. Each tool provides a piece of the puzzle, but no one puts it all together.
• Operational inefficiency: Lacking a shared view of risk, teams struggle to get in sync and collaborate. DevOps may prioritize releasing code rapidly and continuously, while SecOps gets overwhelmed with alerts that lack development context. This misalignment leads to longer response times and allows critical risks to persist.
• Escalating costs and complexity: As CISOs acquire more point products, licensing fees mount, training needs multiply and complexity balloons. Instead of sharpening security, this tool sprawl shrinks effectiveness as teams grapple with a disjointed security stack.
• Risk prioritization gaps: How do you determine which issue is more critical when you’re looking at multiple dashboards, each flashing a cyber risk score for their particular area? Without a common, homogeneous risk-scoring model, you can’t make informed decisions and allocate resources accordingly.

Tenable Cloud Security: A unified vision for cloud risk

To solve these challenges, organizations need a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) that doesn’t treat cloud security as another silo, but rather as an integrated component of a broader exposure management strategy. This is a key first principle that we at Tenable understand.

Powered by the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, Tenable Cloud Security provides an ecosystem-wide view by correlating risks across infrastructure as code (IaC), cloud runtime environments, user identities and IT infrastructure. Tenable offers a single, cohesive platform that provides clarity for SecOps, CloudSec, DevOps, and GRC teams, all from one platform.

Key capabilities for a holistic view

Tenable delivers this unified vision through a set of deeply integrated capabilities designed to connect disparate signals and provide actionable context.

1. Unified risk correlation: Tenable moves beyond simply listing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. It actively identifies "toxic combinations" – the dangerous intersections of different risks. For example, it can pinpoint an exploitable vulnerability on a publicly accessible cloud server that is also accessible by an identity with excessive permissions. This holistic view shines a light on the most likely attack paths before adversaries can exploit them.
2. Shared prioritization: Tenable employs a normalized risk scoring model that blends vulnerability data (like CVSS and Tenable's own Vulnerability Priority Rating), asset criticality and access paths. This provides a single, understandable metric of risk, whether it originates in a container, a network device or a cloud workload. This allows all teams to operate from a common understanding, reducing alert fatigue and focusing on the biggest risks.
3. Development-to-runtime context: Security can’t be an afterthought. Tenable provides traceability from code to cloud, connecting risks found in IaC templates (like Terraform) to the live runtime environment. This "shift left" approach enables developers to remediate risks early in the lifecycle and gives security teams full context, bridging the gap between development and operations.
4. Identity-aware and least-privilege enforcement: Integrated cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities are key for effective cloud security. Tenable surfaces excessive and unused permissions across all human and machine identities. By visualizing toxic combinations like admin-level access on internet-exposed resources, Tenable helps organizations to enforce a policy of least privilege, dramatically reducing the attack surface.
5. Board-level reporting and strategic alignment: Tenable translates complex technical findings into executive-ready reports that map exposures to business impact. This allows security leaders to demonstrate compliance, justify investments and communicate the organization's risk posture in a language the C-suite and board can understand.

The Tenable advantage: From silos to synergy

By integrating cloud security into a comprehensive exposure management platform, Tenable Cloud Security delivers transformative benefits:

• Tool consolidation: Reduce cost and complexity by replacing multiple point products with a single, unified platform.
• Cross-team collaboration: Align SecOps, CloudSec, and DevOps with a shared, contextualized view of risk, optimizing workflows and accelerating remediation.
• Risk-based prioritization: Move from chasing myriad alerts to fixing what matters most, regardless of where the risk lives in your environment.
• Continuous compliance: Streamline audit preparation and maintain continuous alignment with popular industry and regulatory frameworks.

Tenable empowers organizations to manage cyber risk across the full, modern attack surface. It provides the clarity, context and confidence needed to move faster, innovate securely and address the most critical cyber risks.

Click here to learn more about how Tenable Cloud Security can help you obtain an ecosystem view of cloud risk.