Attack Surface Management Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: Attack Surface Management (ASM) solutions continuously identify, monitor, and remediate vulnerabilities to help security teams minimize their organization’s attack surface (i.e., potential entry points for an attacker looking to compromise their network).

The global attack surface management market was estimated at USD 980.4 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 31.3% between 2024 and 2030.
Market growth is being driven by increasing sophistication in attack techniques, combined with increasing diversity and complexity of IT environments as organizations embrace third-party services, SaaS apps, cloud storage, IoT and OT devices, and BYOD devices—all of which introduce new vulnerabilities and dependencies, thereby broadening the attack surface.
- “Everyone is on a journey to the hybrid cloud, and the way we work has evolved. No one’s got rid of their on-premises environment completely, but they are consuming containerized solutions and SaaS applications in greater numbers. […] So, understanding what they have and how it relates to the rest of the environment is very difficult today, because of these siloed applications.” – Jamie Cowper, VP of Marketing at Noetic Cyber.

Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading attack surface management solutions, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their app control challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the application control and wider endpoint security space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best attack surface management products on the market in our Network Security and Security Monitoring Hubs.

Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your attack surface management solution:

For effectiveness: If it doesn’t give you visibility over your entire attack surface, an ASM tool isn’t doing its job. To provide that visibility, it needs to be able to integrate with every aspect of your existing environment. It can be tricky to find a tool that will do that, so choose one that offers as many out-of-the-box integrations with your environment as possible and will allow you to build custom integrations for any tools that it can’t connect with natively.
For a straightforward deployment: While you’re preparing to onboard your ASM tool, use an Asset Discovery tool to help you identify which assets the ASM tool needs to cover, including any unmanaged or shadow IT.
For “lightening the load”: Most ASM tools offer great risk prioritization features—use them! IT and security teams are notoriously over-burdened. By letting your ASM tool analyze and prioritize risks for you, you can allocate your team’s time and energy to where it’s most needed, whilst reducing the time it takes you to respond to critical issues.

How Attack Surface Management solutions work: Within the ASM space, there are different types of solutions that help you monitor specific parts of the attack surface. For example:

Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solutions help you discover, classify, and secure your cyber assets (e.g., devices, software, and data).
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solutions help you manage and secure your external, internet-facing assets, i.e., ones that can be accessed by someone outside your business (e.g., websites, public clouds, and credentials).
Application Attack Surface Management (AASM) solutions, or API ASM solutions, provide visibility into the security of your software applications.

Whether you’re looking for a broad ASM tool that will cover the entire attack surface, or a more specific tool that will help you identify vulnerabilities in key areas, these solutions typically work in a similar way.

First, they’re deployed as a cloud-based solution that integrates with other cybersecurity tools such as vulnerability scanners and incident response tools, as well as the rest of your infrastructure.

Once deployed, the ASM tool creates an inventory or map of all the assets within your network (e.g., servers, endpoints, APIs, web and SaaS apps, DNS records, and third-party systems). It then analyzes your attack surface from the perspective of a threat actor by identifying potential entry points into your network and opportunities or weaknesses that an attacker could exploit.

When it identifies vulnerabilities, the ASM tool analyzes them, prioritizing them based on the likelihood of a compromise occurring and the severity of its impact. This also involves looking at the dependencies between different parts of your network.

“Assets are important, but it’s actually the cyber relationships between them that’s crucial,” Jamie Cowper, VP of Marketing at Noetic Cyber, told Expert Insights in an exclusive interview. “You care, of course, if a machine has vulnerabilities, but you care even more if it has vulnerabilities and it’s supporting a tier one application, or it’s the CISOs laptop. That context is really where the cyber risk information comes from.”

With this intelligence, you can take steps to remediate the most high-risk vulnerabilities across your network, thus reducing your attack surface.

Benefits of Attack Surface Management solutions: There are four main use cases for implementing an attack surface management tool:

Identify vulnerabilities
- ASM solutions continuously scan and analyze your network assets to identify any vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers, such as misconfigurations, open ports, publicly accessible services, OS and software vulnerabilities, devices without multi-factor authentication, etc.
- This means you don’t have to manually check and re-check every system, device, and app within your network for vulnerabilities—the solution does it for you.
Reduce risk
- By prioritizing or scoring risks based on their potential impact, ASM solutions enable you to address the most serious issues first.
Improve incident response times
- ASM tools completely automate the process of scanning your attack surface, identifying vulnerabilities, and prioritizing them. This means your team can spend less time looking for vulnerabilities and can focus instead on quick and effective remediation.
- Plus, by prioritizing the vulnerabilities they find, ASM tools help your team respond to the most critical incidents more quickly.
- This helps you to remove risks before a threat actor has the chance to exploit them.
Achieve compliance
- By inventorying and mapping your network, ASM tools can help you identify where your sensitive data is stored and how it can be accessed, so you can take proactive steps to secure that specific data.
- You can also align your ASM workflows with regulatory frameworks relevant to your organization to ensure that each asset is running in line with your defined security and compliance policies. This means the ASM tool will automatically notify you of any compliance drift or non-compliance.

Common Attack Surface Management challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing an attack surface management solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

Keeping up with changes within a growing or dynamic network: If you’re regularly changing or adding to your IT environment, you’ll also be regularly introducing new vulnerabilities to it. To combat these, choose a tool that offers dynamic asset discovery, which will allow it to continuously scan for new network assets. Plus, make integration with your ASM tool part of the deployment process whenever you add new hardware or software to your network.
Discovering unknown assets and shadow IT: When you first deploy your ASM tool, complete an in-depth asset inventory to help you uncover any unmanaged assets or shadow IT. To help with this, look for a tool with advanced asset discovery features.
Integration complexity: Integrating an ASM solution can be complex, particularly if you have a diverse IT environment. Make sure your solution offers native integrations with as many parts of your environment as possible, as well as the ability for you to create custom integrations. On that note, if nobody on your team has the knowledge to build custom integrations, look for an ASM vendor that can do it for you as part of the deployment process.

Best Attack Surface Management providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of attack surface management solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

Features checklist: When comparing attack surface management solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Automated asset discovery: Your ASM solution should automatically discovery and inventory all the assets on your network, including unmanaged assets and IoT devices. As part of this, it should document the asset’s hardware/software versions, open ports, dependencies, and who they’re accessed by.
Integration: For streamlined deployment and management, your solution should offer native integrations with your existing endpoint security, vulnerability management, patch management, and ticketing tools. You should also be able to create custom integrations where needed.
Real-time monitoring: Your solution should identify potential risks as they emerge and then track them as they evolve to help you remediate them quickly and effectively.
Risk scoring: Your solution should be able to classify different types of risk and threat, including security, financial, operational, and compliance risks. It should then analyze their severity and potential impact and use that analysis to assign each risk a score or level of priority to help you decide which ones to address first.
Vulnerability remediation: The best ASM tools offer automatic remediation for more straightforward vulnerabilities. If the platform can’t remediate the vulnerability itself, it should provide you with clear insights and/or recommendations on how your team should address the issue.
Alerting and reporting: You should be able to generate detailed reports into your exposures and risk trends. Some ASM tools also offer predictive analytics, which predicts potential future risks so you can take steps to prevent them before they ever come to fruition.

Future trends: As the ASM market continues to grow, we expect it embrace technological advancements to improve the accuracy of threat and risk detection.

Specifically, while many ASM tools are already using AI and ML to automate routine tasks such as patch management, we expect that more ASM tools will start to leverage more advanced predictive analytics. This may analyze historical data to identify patterns that may indicate potential future threats.

This will help teams take a more proactive approach to security, allowing them to strengthen existing defenses in anticipation of attacks to prevent their success, rather than responding to successful breaches.

Additionally, we expect ASM tools to broaden their range of integrations, particularly with SOAR solutions. SOAR tools coordinate and automate security and operations tasks, streamline event analysis, and automate response processes. By integrating ASM with SOAR, teams will be able to further reduce the amount of manual analysis required of them, as well as coordinate and automate response workflows for more efficient remediation.