Runtime Visibility Meets Intelligent Remediation: ZEST + Upwind

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.
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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.
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Understanding the Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar
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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.
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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.
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ZEST Security in Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive
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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.
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The Problem with Reactive Exposure Management
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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?
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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
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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.
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What This Means for ZEST Customers
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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.
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Try our free remediation risk assessment today and shift from reactive to proactive security operations.