Relying on EDR for Exposure Management? Here’s What You Need to Know

Endpoint detection and response tools may serve you well when it comes to handling incident response. But, when used for exposure management, they can leave you blind to large portions of your attack surface.

We get it: your teams are drowning in security alerts and data and you’re under pressure to demonstrate ROI with the tools you have. Who can blame you for wanting to keep things simple? Turning to your endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendor to try and meet your exposure management needs is tempting. After all, those EDR tools serve you well when it comes to handling incident response. So why wouldn’t a single-agent approach for managing exposure work equally well for preventive security?

In reality, when used for exposure management, EDR solutions leave organizations blind to vast areas of the attack surface because they only scan endpoints instrumented with their agents. As a result, EDR tools can’t give you visibility into all the other devices — including routers, switches, firewalls, VPNs, OT/IoT devices, and unmanaged assets — that threat actors exploit to gain access and move laterally across your network. Think of the way Salt Typhoon and other threat actors have exploited flaws in network devices to gain initial access: EDR tools wouldn’t see that.

We summarize the key challenges of using EDR for exposure management in the video below. 

Even when they’re built with network scanning capabilities for vulnerability assessment, EDR solutions pale in comparison to Tenable for both vulnerability and exposure management. In a head-to-head analysis, Tenable detected 40% more vulnerabilities and 16% more CVEs than a competing EDR solution. Meanwhile, the EDR solution failed to detect weak cipher suites, known remote desktop protocol (RDP) exposures, and SQL flaws. These are glaring oversights, given how frequently attackers exploit weak encryption, open RDP, and SQL, and given that the ability to detect weak encryption is a requirement for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

EDR for exposure management and the myth of cost savings

EDR providers will tell you that their single-agent architecture will save you money and simplify complexity. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Organizations that have turned to their EDR provider for vulnerability or exposure management have seen cost and complexity skyrocket. Why? Because EDR solutions require extensive integrations to provide the minimum scanning coverage and remediation capabilities to function as a vulnerability or exposure management solution.

Beware of EDR solutions branded “exposure management” 

Exposure management is a proactive security practice that requires deep vulnerability intelligence as a foundational component. Vulnerability data drawn from multiple sources, including CVE data, threat intelligence, and behavioral analysis, gives you the context you need to assess risk. Detection needs to extend beyond package versions to include registry settings and misconfigurations so you can fully understand the potential impact in your environment. False positives should be kept to a minimum and, when they do occur, you need the ability to flag and suppress them so you can fine-tune the detection logic over time.

Data transparency is also key. CVE coverage should be fully visible within the tool and publicly accessible. EDR solutions are often insufficiently invested in vulnerability intelligence and CVE coverage is typically not published. Even when CVE data and threat intelligence are used, they’re primarily limited to agent-based deployments.

Most importantly, EDR can’t reveal gaps in your coverage and give you the context you need to understand where attackers are most likely to go once they enter your environment. Without that knowledge, you can’t effectively close off attack paths before they’re exploited.

Here are 10 essential exposure management criteria and how Tenable’s offerings compare to an EDR-centric approach.

How exposure management with Tenable compares to EDR-centric tools

Source: Tenable, October 2025

Conclusion

Tenable helps organizations move from reactive firefighting to proactive exposure management. By going beyond endpoints and malware alerts, it delivers complete visibility and clear guidance, giving you the clarity and confidence you need to stay ahead of threats.

Tenable delivers full attack surface coverage with faster time to detection, deeper compliance, and richer intelligence so you can know, expose, and close risk everywhere it lives. It aggregates data across dozens of security tools, providing pre-defined templates, customizable reports, and benchmarking against sector standards to support mixed regulatory and audit requirements. It covers 84% of CIS Benchmarks and natively supports major compliance frameworks, including CIS, NIST, and DISA STIG. Partners like Vanta offer integrations for full compliance evaluations and certification workflows.

With Tenable, security teams can act with confidence, not uncertainty.

Learn more

• Read the blog: Exposure Management Beyond the Endpoint
• View the on-demand webinar: Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive
• Request a demo: https://www.tenable.com/try
• Visit the resource page: https://www.tenable.com/lp/campaigns/25/compare/tenable-vs-crowdstrike/