Launch Week Day 2: Exposures in Action

Launch Week Day 2 – Unified Vulnerability Management Starts With Unified Data

When we introduced Axonius Exposures last April, we set out to solve a longstanding problem in vulnerability and exposure management: visibility without context leads to noise, not action.

The reception of our launch confirmed our hypotheses:

• Security teams want to focus on strategy, not chase down vulnerabilities and exposures across siloed tools.

• Meaningful risk prioritization needs more than CVSS scores – it requires asset, security, and business context across any asset type.

• Filing a ticket isn’t enough. Remediation needs ownership, orchestration, and automation.

Today, we’re expanding Axonius Exposures with new capabilities designed to make risk management more comprehensive, explainable, and resilient: Vulnerability Instances for All Asset Types, Risk Score Explainability, and Risk Score Calculus.

Universal visibility with Vulnerability Instances for every asset type

Traditional Vulnerability Management platforms are built on a rigid assumption that:

- a vulnerability is introduced by software,

- running in a compute instance,

- found by a proprietary vulnerability scanner,

- with manual input of business context (via tags).

- and prioritization driven mostly by technical security score.

This legacy model creates blind spots, and forces teams to write custom code, buy new modules, or wait for vendor roadmaps just to see vulnerabilities in modern environments like serverless functions, code repositories, or SaaS platforms.

How it works

With Vulnerability Instances on all asset types, Axonius automatically links any vulnerability to any of the 40+ asset types in the platform, regardless of how or where it’s discovered. This is powered by our native Asset Intelligence engine, which enriches and contextualizes findings across environments.

That means you can now:

• See vulnerabilities associated with non-traditional assets like software libraries, code repositories, or SaaS configurations.

• Eliminate reliance on proprietary scanners or rigid compute-based constructs.

• Tie every finding to the full asset, business, and security context Axonius already provides.

The value of Vulnerability Instances on all asset types goes far beyond eliminating visibility gaps. Because they’re fully integrated with the Axonius Asset Intelligence platform, each finding inherits rich context – enabling smarter risk prioritization, accurate ownership attribution, and automated remediation through Workflows and Cases – all of the orchestration power.

Vulnerability Instances in Action

• Pinpointing vulnerable instances across diverse asset types: Identify exactly which EC2 instance, GitHub repo, or unmanaged device is affected — not just that a vulnerability exists somewhere.

• Discovering exposures beyond compute services: See vulnerability instances in SaaS apps, cloud services, and other non-scanned assets that typical VM tools miss.

• Resolving fragmented findings into clear exposure paths: Combine signals from scanners, asset inventories, and configuration sources to build a complete picture of where each vulnerability lives.

• Driving action with asset-level precision: Assign ownership, prioritize based on context, and initiate remediation – all tied to the specific affected asset, not just a generic CVE.

By anchoring vulnerabilities to real, contextualized assets regardless of type or source, Axonius turns scattered signals into clear, actionable exposure assessments.

Learn more about Vulnerability Instances in the Docs.

Making Risk Scores Explainable (and Defensible)

Risk scores are essential for prioritization – but when they’re opaque, they create more problems than they solve. Too often, teams are told to act on a “critical” issue with no explanation beyond a score like 8.56. The result? Pushback, confusion, and stalled remediation.

Black box risk scores break trust with developers, stakeholders, and auditors alike.

Axonius Exposures changes that with Risk Score Explainability: full transparency into how every score is calculated, and why it matters.

How it works

Every risk score in Axonius is now fully traceable – not just a number, but a breakdown of the exact logic and context behind it. When reviewing any vulnerability instance, security teams can see:

• The full list of data points used in the score: security, asset, and business context

• The specific result and weight assigned to each individual data point

• A direct link to the exact risk score policy that was enforced

• The final aggregated score, with full transparency across the entire calculation

A clear score arms your teams with the data they need to have intelligent, evidence-based conversations with stakeholders.

When you can instantly show a system owner that a vulnerability is urgent because it’s on an internet-exposed, PCI-compliant server that hasn’t been seen by an agent in 60 days, objections turn into agreement, and collaboration turns into action.

Transparency builds trust with stakeholders, justifies urgency, and creates a feedback loop for continuously improving your risk model.

Learn more about Risk Scoring in the Docs.

Advanced risk score calculus (because data is imperfect!)

Most risk scoring models rely on a fragile assumption: that the data used to calculate risk is clean, complete, and consistent. But in reality, the data is often messy – attributes conflict, fields are missing, and sources don’t always agree. 

A vulnerability might have three different exploitability scores depending on the source – or none at all. And when traditional risk calculators hit that ambiguity, they either fail, generate errors, or produce misleading results. 

The outcome? Security teams are forced into endless cycles of manual data cleanup, or worse, abandon automated scoring altogether.

Axonius Exposures changes that with a resilient scoring engine designed to handle imperfect data without sacrificing accuracy or transparency.

How it works

We designed an Advanced Risk Score Calculus as a flexible, policy-driven engine that adapts to the reality of your environment – ensuring scoring continues even when inputs aren't ideal.

Our enhanced logic and user experience enable security teams to build sophisticated scoring models that reflect their operational reality:

• Combination Logic: When an asset has conflicting values (e.g., tagged both “Production” and “Staging”), you can define how to resolve it – use the highest risk value, the most recent, or a custom policy.

• Normalization: Standardize inconsistent or misaligned data into a consistent, usable format before applying scoring logic.

• Fallback Values: Fill in the blanks with intelligent defaults – fall back to secondary fields or assign a baseline risk when key data is missing.

By combining Advanced Risk Score Calculus with Risk Score Explainability, Axonius gives you a complete breakdown of how every score is computed – even when the underlying data is messy.

You’ll see exactly when combination logic resolved a conflict, when a value was normalized, or when a fallback filled a gap – all fully transparent and traceable, delivering a risk model that actually works in the real world:

• No brittle logic that breaks when a field is missing.

• No manual cleanup required just to keep scoring accurate.

• No guessing how a score was derived.

Instead, you get a reliable, automated prioritization engine that reflects your true environment, delivering more accurate, more defensible, and more trustworthy scores.

And most importantly: it empowers your team to spend less time manually reconciling data, and more time addressing real exposures.

Learn more about Risk Scoring in the Docs.

Wrap Up: Take action with Axonius Exposures

Day 2 of Launch week brought how we're expanding Axonius Exposures to:

• Reach universal visibility regardless of your assets

• Give you risk score transparency to carry conversations and promote collaboration with confidence

• Improve your risk scoring even if the data is not perfect

Put together, these capabilities improve your ability to discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities and exposures from all your assets and security solutions in a single place. We do the heavy lifting and take silos away, you focus on security strategy and impact!

More from Launch Week

See all the action for Launch Week here.

• Platform Actionability – Make actionability a reality with workflows, ticket binding, and 500+ actions 

• Identities in Action – lifecycle and governance flows that keep access in line with policy.

• Actionable UX Enhancements – a fresh look and feel for the Axonius console and API.

If you’re new to Axonius, book a demo to see Actionability in action for yourself.