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The high volume of alerts, combined with tedious and manual remediation processes, has resulted in a growing risk backlog and a rise in cyber incidents. As a result, many organizations are adopting an incident response mentality in their cloud security risk management programs, treating risk remediation with the same urgency seen in IR plans to reduce risk acceptance and minimize exposure.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the key factors behind this shift and why more organizations are adopting an IR mindset for cloud security risk remediation.
1. Most incidents are related to risks already known to the organization
A large majority of incidents (in fact, over 62%), are directly related to risks the organization was already fully aware of, but couldn’t remediate in time – or at all. Vulnerabilities, cloud misconfigurations, and other security risks are still among the top initial access vectors for cyberattacks and/or allow adversaries to execute critical stages of attack once in an environment – such as lateral movement, persistence, etc. Slow and manual remediation processes leave attackers with an extended window of opportunity, meaning many of these incidents could have been avoided with more efficient remediation. Further, the fact that 56% of risks can’t be remediated, leaves a bucket of issues accepted by the organization, increasing the potential for security incidents when appropriate mitigating controls are not implemented.
2. Time to exploit vulnerabilities is now just days
The time it takes for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities has drastically decreased, highlighting the urgent need for faster remediation. According to Mandiant, the average time-to-exploit (TTE) has dropped from 32 days the previous year to just 5 days today. As attackers leverage advanced tools, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), to identify and exploit open risks at a faster pace, security teams must do the same. AI is being used by attackers to scan environments quickly, identify vulnerabilities, and exploit them before organizations can react. Taking into consideration that the average TTE is now just days, organizations typically take 10X longer to remediate vulnerabilities than it takes for attackers to exploit them.
3. Regulations and compliance
Compliance is another major driver behind the push for more efficient cloud security risk management. Organizations are under increasing pressure to meet stringent regulatory requirements and remediate vulnerabilities in a timely manner. For instance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommends that critical vulnerabilities be remediated within 15 days, and high-risk vulnerabilities within 30 days. On average it takes many organizations 6 weeks (best case) and over 8 weeks (worst case) to remediate an application vulnerability in production. Given the speed at which attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities, regulations are likely to shorten these recommended timelines even further, pushing organizations to adopt new strategies that improve the overall efficiency of their risk management programs.
4. Remediation costs remain high
Inefficient remediation is costing organizations millions of dollars in operational spending annually. To put this into perspective, most organizations have more than four people involved in opening and closing a single security ticket. Extensive coordination across different internal teams – such as DevOps, engineering, and executive leadership – is often required to ensure vulnerabilities are prioritized and fixed or mitigated. The time, resources, and effort required to validate the risk, gather the necessary context, find the best path to resolution, prioritize the fix, and implement a solution, all drives up the cost of remediation.
In addition to direct costs, there are also opportunity costs to consider. Teams often have to put aside other important initiatives, such as revenue-generating projects (e.g. product development or scalability) to focus on risk remediation, leading to missed opportunities.
What are security teams doing about it?
- Prioritization Based on Effort & Impact: With an overwhelming backlog of vulnerabilities, many organizations are adopting effort-based prioritization. This strategy allows security teams to address the largest number of risks with the least amount of changes, providing the greatest impact on reducing the backlog. This is usually achieved by effectively correlating risks based on common root cause / fix.
- Mitigation Using Existing Controls: Because there are many cases where remediation is too time consuming, requires too much effort, or is just not possible, security teams are increasingly leaning on cloud-native services and existing security controls to reduce or eliminate risk. This approach not only minimizes the number of risks requiring urgent attention, but it also empowers security teams to take immediate action, even while waiting for other teams / owners, who may be handling competing priorities, to implement the necessary fix.
- Automation and Agentic AI: Security teams are turning to automation to streamline the end-to-end remediation process – especially to drastically reduce the time it takes to triage findings, conduct root cause analysis, and prioritize alerts. AI (LLMs and AI agents) are being applied to perform complex tasks at a scale that wouldn’t be possible for even the most advanced security teams. For example, AI has the power “to run infinite options and provide the best resolution paths” eliminating the need to do manual code review, and many other time consuming tasks required to find and implement appropriate solutions.
ZEST was founded to bridge the gap between identifying security risks and efficiently remediating them. To learn how security teams are leveraging ZEST to minimize exposure, meet compliance, and reduce operational costs, reach out to our team.
We're excited to announce that ZEST Security has been recognized as a vendor in three Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar reports this year: Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive, Global Attack Surface Grid, and Preemptive Cybersecurity.
As organizations face increasingly complex threat landscapes, the need for preemptive exposure management, dynamic attack surface reduction, and automated security assessment has never been more critical.
Understanding the Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar
Gartner's Emerging Tech Impact Radar helps organizations identify and evaluate emerging technologies that could significantly impact their business operations. These reports assess technologies based on their potential transformative impact and adoption timeline, providing IT and security leaders with crucial insights for strategic planning.
Being featured in three separate reports confirms that ZEST Security is positioned at the forefront of multiple emerging technologies that are fundamentally reshaping security operations, enabling organizations to move from reactive vulnerability management to proactive, automated risk prevention.
ZEST Security in Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive
In June 2025, ZEST Security was recognized in Gartner's Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive report, underscoring the industry's recognition of our approach to transforming how organizations manage security exposures.
The Problem with Reactive Exposure Management
Traditional exposure management creates a perpetual cycle of detection and remediation that leaves organizations constantly playing catch-up. Security teams face thousands of identified vulnerabilities with no clear prioritization, alert fatigue from tools lacking context, and resource constraints that prevent them from addressing an ever-growing backlog.
What is Preemptive Exposure Management?
Preemptive Exposure Management shifts the focus from cataloging existing vulnerabilities to preventing them. This approach enables organizations to anticipate exposures before they become exploitable, maintain continuous real-time visibility, prioritize based on actual business risk rather than theoretical scores, and receive automated remediation guidance.
The result? Teams stay ahead of threats instead of constantly responding to them.
ZEST Security in the Global Attack Surface Grid Report
Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction in Action
Building on preemptive exposure management, Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction actively and continuously minimizes the points of potential compromise across an organization's digital infrastructure. Unlike periodic assessments that quickly become outdated, this approach provides continuous visibility and enables real-time reduction of security exposures.
The Modern Attack Surface Challenge
Cloud infrastructure, remote work, third-party integrations, shadow IT, and connected devices have expanded the enterprise attack surface exponentially. Organizations struggle with unknown assets creating blind spots, daily infrastructure changes introducing new exposures, and hybrid multi-cloud environments that are difficult to monitor comprehensively.
ZEST's Solution
ZEST Security provides continuous visibility into your attack surface with context-driven insights that help teams understand which exposures pose the greatest risk. By automating identification and assessment, we enable organizations to maintain an optimized security posture even as infrastructure evolves, aligned with our preemptive approach to identifying and addressing risks before exploitation.
ZEST Security in the Preemptive Cybersecurity Report
Automated Security Control Assessment
Automated Security Control Assessment evolves security from manual, point-in-time evaluations to continuous, automated validation of security controls. Organizations can verify their defenses are functioning as intended without the delays and resource requirements of manual testing, shifting from detecting and responding to breaches to preventing them.
The Challenge: Too Much Data, Not Enough Context
Security teams don't lack vulnerability data—they lack the ability to make sense of it. Organizations deploy numerous tools that identify thousands of potential issues, but without context, teams can't determine which vulnerabilities pose genuine risk or how to prioritize remediation.
ZEST's AI-Powered Solution
ZEST Security bridges this gap with AI-powered analysis that translates vulnerability data into actionable remediation pathways. Our platform continuously validates security control effectiveness, identifies coverage gaps before exploitation, prioritizes based on actual risk exposure rather than just scores, and automates assessment workflows that would otherwise consume significant manual effort.
A Comprehensive Preemptive Security Strategy
These three Gartner reports address complementary aspects of a unified goal: reducing organizational risk before breaches occur.
Preemptive Exposure Management establishes the foundational philosophy of staying ahead of threats. Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction minimizes exposure points across your infrastructure. Automated Security Control Assessment validates that defenses protecting those exposure points function effectively.
Together, they create a complete preemptive security lifecycle:
- Anticipate potential exposures before they become vulnerabilities
- Minimize attack surface by eliminating unnecessary exposures
- Validate that security controls function as intended
- Remediate issues that pose actual business risk
ZEST Security's recognition in all three reports reflects our holistic approach. We provide the context and guidance needed for effective action across the entire security lifecycle.
What This Means for ZEST Customers
This triple recognition validates the strategic value our platform delivers:
Preemptive operations: Move from reactive firefighting to proactive risk prevention across all security aspects.
Continuous visibility: Understand your attack surface, exposures, and security posture in real-time, not just during periodic assessments.
AI-powered intelligence: Process security data at scale and identify what matters most.
Actionable guidance: Get clear remediation pathways, not just alerts and scores.
Integrated platform: Address exposure management, attack surface reduction, and control validation in one solution.
Industry Validation
ZEST Security's inclusion in three Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar reports within six months signals a broader industry shift toward preemptive security. Organizations increasingly recognize that traditional reactive models can't keep pace with modern threats driven by cloud adoption, DevOps practices, remote work, and sophisticated attack techniques.
Gartner's focus on these capabilities in their emerging technology research indicates they're becoming essential requirements for effective risk management, not optional add-ons.
The Future Belongs to Preemptive Security
As threat actors grow more sophisticated and attack surfaces expand, organizations can't rely solely on detection and response. The future belongs to security teams that proactively identify and eliminate risk before breaches occur.
ZEST Security continues innovating at the forefront of this evolution, developing capabilities that help security teams work smarter, reduce risk, and protect their organizations more effectively through intelligent automation, continuous assessment, context-driven prioritization, and preemptive action.
Get Started with ZEST Security
Ready to implement preemptive exposure management, dynamic attack surface reduction, and automated security control assessment? Our free AI-based remediation risk assessment provides a practical starting point for understanding your current security posture and identifying priority improvements.
Try our free remediation risk assessment today and shift from reactive to proactive security operations.
