Exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) continuously identify and prioritize exposures, such as vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, across a broad range of asset classes. They natively deliver or integrate with discovery capabilities, such as assessment tools, that enumerate exposures, like vulnerabilities and configuration issues, to increase visibility. EAPs use techniques like threat intelligence (TI) to analyze an organization’s attack surfaces and weaknesses, and prioritize treatment efforts for high-risk exposures by incorporating threat landscape, business and existing security control context. Through prioritized visualizations and treatment recommendations, EAPs help provide direction for mobilization, identifying the various teams involved in mitigation and remediation. EAPs are primarily delivered as self-hosted software or as a cloud service, and may use agents for exposure information collection.
Gartner defines network automation platforms as systems that automate and orchestrate the configuration, deployment, and operational management of network infrastructure. Network automation platforms are delivered via software and interact directly with network devices, network controllers (or fabric managers), network services, network management systems, and other automation tools.
Gartner defines network security microsegmentation — also referred to as zero-trust network segmentation — as an effort that can create more granular and dynamic access policies than traditional network segmentation (often north-south traffic segmentation). It allows the insertion of a security policy between any two workloads in the same broadcast domain — with microsegmentation technologies narrowing fine-grained network zones down to individual assets and applications. Microsegmentation tools support the implementation of finer-grained zoning across public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Cybersecurity leaders must understand the key features, use cases, and role of microsegmentation in their environment, as well as determine which model is the best fit for their needs.
VA solutions identify, categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities as well as orchestrate their remediation or mitigation. Their primary focus is vulnerability and security configuration assessments for enterprise risk identification and reduction, and reporting against various compliance standards. VA can be delivered via on-premises, hosted and cloud-based solutions, and it may use appliances and agents. Core capabilities include: - Discovery, identification and reporting on device, OS, software vulnerabilities and configuration against security-related criteria - Establishing a baseline for systems, applications and databases to identify and track changes in state - Reporting options for compliance, control frameworks and multiple roles Standard capabilities include: - Pragmatic remediation prioritization with the ability to correlate vulnerability severity, asset context and threat context that then presents a better picture of true risk for your specific environment - Guidance for remediating and configuring compensating controls - Management of scanner instances, agents and gateways - Direct integration with, or API access to, asset management tools, workflow management tools and patch management tools