Prioritizing what to fix first and why that really matters

Key takeaways

1. The 97% distraction: Discover why the vast majority of your "Critical" alerts are just theoretical noise, and how focusing strictly on the 3% of findings that represent real, exploitable risk can drastically improve your security posture.
2. Identity is the accelerant: Breaches rarely happen in isolation. Learn how "toxic combinations" — the critical intersection of vulnerability, misconfiguration, and privileged identity – can turn individual flaws into major attack paths that lead to breaches, and why traditional risk scoring misses them entirely.
3. Context is the cure: Stop drowning in volume and start leveraging value. See how shifting from conventional scanning to exposure management allows you to escape "alert fatigue" in the cloud and fix attack paths without touching code, while remediating issues at the source.

The fundamental promise of the cloud is speed and scale. Yet, for security teams, that scale has become the primary adversary. We are currently operating in a cloud security paradox: Organizations have deployed more scanning tools than ever before, yet they have never had less clarity on their actual risk posture.

The industry standard has been to rely on volume as a metric of success. How many issues did we discover? How many did we patch? But in a modern cloud environment, volume is not a metric; it is a liability. When security teams are flooded with thousands of "Critical" alerts based on theoretical severity, they are forced into a reactive posture. Vulnerability teams are all too familiar with this scenario.

The data reveals a stark inefficiency: While legacy tools flag nearly 60% of vulnerabilities as ‘High’ or ‘Critical,’ Tenable Research shows that only about 1.6% to 3% represent real, exploitable business risk. This forces teams to spend the vast majority of their time chasing noise rather than risk.

To mature your cloud security program, you must stop prioritizing based on severity and start prioritizing based on exploitability. It is time to transition from vulnerability management to exposure management.

The operational cost of theoretical risk

The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) has been the default standard for prioritization. However, CVSS lacks the necessary business context to be effective in all domains, particularly the cloud. CVSS measures the severity of a software bug in a vacuum. It does not account for the context of the asset. Is it public? Is it privileged? Is it accessing sensitive data?

If your team is working down a list sorted solely by CVSS, they are wasting valuable cycle time on theoretical flaws while genuine attack paths remain open. The goal is not to fix more; the goal is to fix what matters. As the saying goes: “When everything is important, nothing is important.”

Toxic combinations: Defining true risk

In modern security, essentially every breach is an identity breach. While a misconfiguration or a vulnerability might provide the initial foothold, it is the identity, and specifically its entitlements and privileges, that allows a security incident to go from "bad" to "worse."

Breaches rarely happen in isolation. They occur at the precise intersection of public exposure, vulnerability, and privileged identity. This convergence, the toxic combination, creates the perfect storm for attackers.

Correlating these factors is notoriously difficult because the data often lives in silos: vulnerability data in one tool, IAM data in another, and network exposure in a third. The demand on security teams today is to bridge these gaps, turning raw data into context, into clear insight, into action.

True risk is defined by the convergence of these three factors, which attackers relish:

• Public exposure: The asset is accessible from the internet.
• Critical vulnerability: The software contains a known, exploitable flaw.
• High privilege or entitlement: The associated identity has broad permissions (e.g., Admin or Root).

In toxic combinations, vulnerability often opens the door, but high privilege hands the attacker the keys to the kingdom. Despite the clear danger, nearly 29% of organizations currently have at least one workload operating with this exact setup in place, according to the Tenable Cloud Security Risk Report 2025.

These combinations are the primary targets for threat actors because they offer a direct path to data exfiltration, ransomware, or other malicious impacts. Identifying and remediating these specific intersections, rather than chasing a generic list of CVEs, is the difference between "busy work" and actual risk reduction by addressing your exposure.

The Jenga® Effect: Inherited risk in AI and identity

The challenge of prioritization is compounded by the rapid adoption of AI and the layered nature of cloud services, which Tenable Cloud Research has dubbed the "Jenga effect.”

When deploying AI workloads, organizations often inherit risky default configurations from providers. For instance, 90.5% of organizations that have configured Amazon SageMaker have root access enabled by default in at least one notebook instance, according to the Tenable Cloud AI Risk Report 2025. If the foundational block of your stack is insecure, the entire workload is compromised.

Furthermore, identity has become the prime target and goal of attackers**.** You can patch every piece of software in your environment, but if an attacker compromises an over-privileged identity, they do not need an exploit. They simply log in. With 84% of organizations possessing unused or longstanding access keys with critical permissions, a finding from Tenable Cloud Research Report 2024, identity security posture management is no longer optional.

A mature exposure management strategy must treat identity risks and AI misconfigurations with the same urgency as software vulnerabilities.

Operationalizing exposure management

To close the efficiency gap seen in the cloud, security leaders must adopt a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that unifies visibility and forces prioritization based on context.

Here is how to shift your operating model:

1. Maintain momentum (The 5-minute audit)

Paralysis is the enemy of security. When faced with a mountain of alerts, teams often freeze. Tenable Cloud Security breaks this paralysis with the "If you only have 5 minutes" widget. This feature isn’t about deep forensic analysis; it is about hygiene and momentum. It identifies the immediate, obvious "quick wins," like a publicly exposed S3 bucket or an inactive key that you can fix right now. This ensures that even on your busiest days, you are fixing something versus nothing. It keeps the "hygiene debt" from piling up while you prepare for deeper work. This is a great place for security to focus junior level employees.

2. Attack the toxic combinations

Once the quick wins are handled, shift your focus to the strategic risks. This is where you target those toxic combinations. This is where you apply your best resources. By correlating identity, network, and vulnerability data, you identify the 3% of alerts that could lead to a devastating breach. Remediating these exposures creates the measurable drop in organizational risk that you can report to the board.

3. Shift remediation to the source

"ClickOps," the practice of manually fixing settings in the cloud console, is inefficient and temporary. The next deployment often overwrites the fix.

Mature organizations integrate security into the development lifecycle. Tenable Cloud Security traces runtime issues back to the specific Infrastructure as Code (IaC) that created them. It can then automatically generate a pull request with the necessary code changes.

This applies equally to identity. Instead of estimating permissions, the platform analyzes actual usage behavior to generate least privilege policies that strip away unused access automatically.

Conclusion: Value-based security

The metric for a successful cloud security program is no longer "number of alerts closed." It is the measurable reduction of exposure.

We cannot scale our teams to match the growth of the cloud, but we can scale our intelligence. By leveraging context to identify the 3% of exposures that create business risk, you move your organization from a posture of reacting to noise to proactively prioritizing and remediating exposures.

See it in action

The short demo below walks you through a real cloud AI environment and shows how Tenable identifies workloads, reveals hidden risks and highlights the issues that matter most.

It is a quick, straightforward look at exposure management giving you an actual feel for real world use.

Learn more about how to prioritize cloud risk based on what really matters.

(Jenga® is a registered trademark owned by Pokonobe Associates.)

Brinton Taylor

Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager, Identity

Brinton Taylor is a senior product marketing leader with expertise in cybersecurity, specializing in identity exposure and operational technology security. At Tenable, Brinton plays a critical role in developing and executing strategies that drive understanding of Tenable’s innovative solutions, including Tenable Identity Exposure and the Tenable One Platform. With a background that spans managing complex security challenges and working with diverse cybersecurity teams, Brinton is dedicated to helping organizations navigate the evolving security landscape with a proactive, risk-based approach. Passionate about enabling teams and customers, Brinton combines technical insight with strategic vision to make impactful, industry-leading security solutions accessible.