Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM)

Unlike traditional vulnerability management, which focuses primarily on vulnerabilities within IT assets, a unified approach to vulnerability management brings in additional vulnerability data from other security tools and domains: cloud, containers, web applications, operational technology, and others, which creates a single pane of glass for vulnerability data. 

 Core to all UVM solutions are three foundational capabilities:

• Integration with existing vulnerability assessment tools
• Deduplication and normalization of asset and vulnerability data
• An aggregated view of vulnerabilities across your attack surface

Your security teams face a growing list of vulnerabilities, noisy security alerts, fragmented cybersecurity tools, expanding attack surfaces and disparate data that make it nearly impossible to know what your assets are, where they are and which vulnerabilities exist on them.

Unified vulnerability management creates a robust asset and vulnerability inventory, regardless of environment, to support more effective management of cyber risk.

With a vast attack surface, traditional vulnerability management can leave visibility gaps in your security posture. 

For example, an attacker may not be looking for a vulnerability with the highest CVSS score in your IT environment. That’s because teams often patch these first. Rather, they may look for a lower risk vulnerability in a cloud container or OT device to gain access or move laterally. 

Traditional vulnerability management tools lack visibility into cloud containers,  CI/CD pipelines and OT assets. And even when your organization has these specialized security solutions to manage cloud or OT environments, vulnerability management teams may not have visibility into the CVEs that those tools find. 

This gap between heritage vulnerability management tools and other domain tools is where unified vulnerability management fits best. It gives your teams the ability to unify siloed data, holistically manage CVEs and consistently remediate them, regardless of the tool that detected it or where that vulnerability is in your attack surface.

Most unified vulnerability management platforms offer the following capabilities:

1. Unified asset inventory

Collects asset information from existing assessment tools for visualization in a unified inventory.

2. Unified vulnerability visualization

Collects vulnerability data across existing tools for a unified CVEs view.

3. Data unification and rationalization

Deduplicates and normalizes asset and risk data across tools and vendors to unify it in a single repository.

4. Workflow integration

Enables consistent workflow, such as opening tickets and tracking remediation progress across teams.

5. Metrics and reporting

Provides a consistent approach for metrics and reporting of vulnerability management program progress across teams.

Unified vulnerability management capabilities are a subset of exposure management. It unites siloed vulnerability data across tools and vendors to give your teams a more unified view of assets and vulnerabilities. 

Its primary purpose is the unification of visibility. However, if you’re responsible for reducing business exposure, not just finding and patching vulnerabilities, exposure management gives you a complete framework to focus on your most critical cyber threats and exposures first. It does this by extending visibility through broader integration and native discovery capabilities, and adding the rich relationship context you need for advanced prioritization and action. 

Let’s take a closer look at these differences:

• Like unified vulnerability management solutions, exposure management platforms aggregate asset and vulnerability data. However, exposure management platforms integrate with a broader set of tools to collect other types of risk findings, including misconfigurations or excessive human and machine permissions. In addition to integration with existing tools, exposure management platforms have native discovery for a more holistic view of assets across your attack surface.
• Exposure management platforms use this richer asset and risk data to map asset, identity and risk relationships across your attack surface. Your organization can visualize attack paths that threat actors can exploit to reach mission-critical assets, data, services and processes, and prioritize action based on the potential impact.
• Broader attack surface visibility and rich technical and business context enable exposure management to perform advanced risk prioritization, which is not possible with unified vulnerability management. If your organization is looking to go beyond unification of data to enhance prioritization and workflow automation, consider exposure management platforms as part of your evaluation.

Here’s an easy way to understand what each helps you answer:

Unified vulnerability management asks: “What are my vulnerabilities, and where are they?”

Exposure management asks: “How can attackers exploit vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and permissions in combination and which resulting attack paths represent the greatest exposure for my business?”

If you’re running workloads in the cloud, traditional vulnerability management tools won’t give you the complete picture.

Cloud environments are fast-moving and decentralized. New assets, like containers, can spin up and disappear in minutes, and vulnerabilities can appear between scheduled scans. 

To address this challenge, many organizations rely on specialized cloud solutions, such as cloud security posture management and cloud native application protection platforms that directly integrate into cloud providers using APIs. It allows more real-time scanning of cloud environments, and often visibility into vulnerabilities, such as those in containers, before your teams deploy them at scale into production environments.

The challenge is that separate tools silo vital vulnerability data for IT, cloud and even OT. It makes tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), managing service level agreements (SLAs), and compliance, and business-line reporting time-consuming and challenging. 

That’s where unified vulnerability management can help you get a more holistic picture of risk across on-prem and cloud environments. 

Instead of managing vulnerabilities in disparate tools and disconnected workflows, it brings everything together so you can see your full vulnerability picture.

When selecting the right unified vulnerability management solution, you should begin with some basic questions regarding your longer-term cybersecurity needs. 

First, is your primary objective the unification of multi-vendor data to drive better vulnerability management program efficiency and effectiveness? If so, unified vulnerability management may be the right solution. 

However, if your needs go beyond vulnerability data unification, then you may want to look at exposure management solutions and ask yourself these additional questions: 

• Do you have gaps in attack surface visibility you need to fill?
• Are you looking to consolidate tools and vendors to save costs?
• Is aggregation and deduplication enough to manage your growing volumes of findings?
• Could your teams benefit from additional context, such as attack path mapping to see the world as attackers see it and the potential impact of exposures on your business?
• How effectively can you quantify and communicate risk posture and exposure to your lines of business and board of directors today to support investment decisions?

Vendors such as IDC and Gartner have performed detailed assessments of vendors in the exposure management space. For example, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Exposure Management 2025 Vendor Assessment (doc #US52994525, August 2025).

The Tenable buyer’s guide: Exposure management platforms will give you a detailed feature comparison between vulnerability management, risk-based vulnerability management, unified vulnerability management, exposure management and other key solution areas.

While both unified vulnerability management and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) integrate with existing tools for unified visibility into your assets, unified vulnerability management centers around vulnerability management: finding, prioritizing and helping remediate software vulnerabilities. 

In contrast, cyber asset attack surface management focuses on comprehensive asset visibility across all environments (IT, cloud, OT, etc.) to help reduce blind spots, improve cyber hygiene and support multiple security use cases. 

Both of these market segments focus on unifying siloed data across disparate security tools. Both are effective at addressing their intended use cases. 

However, neither addresses the scope of visibility into assets or risk the other provides. They also do not give your teams critical context they need to illuminate and close business exposure. 

For this reason, modern exposure management platforms that address all three requirements have increasingly replaced unified vulnerability management and CAASM.

Tenable has been a leader in vulnerability management for more than 20 years. 

In 2017, Tenable pioneered and defined a vision for moving beyond basic scoring and patching of every vulnerability, to prioritized remediation of business exposures. 

Tenable realized early on that a key milestone in realizing the promise of exposure management was the unification of asset and vulnerability data across the broadest scope of security tools — unified vulnerability management — but also the addition of critical relationship context to distinguish noisy findings from business-impacting exposures.

The Tenable One Exposure Management Platform integrates data from various isolated sources to create a comprehensive and highly contextual understanding of your attack surface. This unified view highlights technical connections attackers exploit among assets, identities and risks, as well as business relationships that support your organization's mission. 

Consequently, your organization can get insight into an attacker's mindset and can also align your staff and investments for the greatest impact on your risk posture and desired outcomes.

Tenable One helps you:

• Discover all your assets and risks across all of your environments, including IT, cloud, identities, applications and OT.
• Unify all findings into a single, comprehensive view to eliminate data silos.
• Prioritize what to fix first based on exploitability, business impact and other key risk indicators.
• Streamline remediation workflows by opening tickets and tracking exposure response..
• Business-align and quantify business exposure, track key indicators and SLAs and report compliance with objectives.

The most common questions around unified vulnerability management pertain to the similarities and differences between it and traditional vulnerability management. But there are other important questions being asked, perhaps you are wondering these as well:

What’s the difference between vulnerability management and unified vulnerability management?

Traditional vulnerability management tools discover and actively scan your environment to detect vulnerabilities. They use industry-standard prioritization, such as CVSS, to rank vulnerabilities by severity for remediation. 

Unlike vulnerability management tools, unified vulnerability management tools do not directly discover assets or assess environments for vulnerabilities. Instead, they collect asset and vulnerability data from any existing vulnerability management and other assessment tools your organization has already deployed in your environments. They then provide a consistent approach for visualization of inventory and CVEs, workflow, metrics and reporting.

Is unified vulnerability management the same as exposure management?

아닙니다. Unified vulnerability management is not the same as exposure management. Unified vulnerability management tools aggregate vulnerability data from existing vulnerability management and other assessment tools. Exposure management tools provide direct discovery of your attack surface and integration with existing tools for a more holistic view of your attack surface. They also detect and aggregate more types of risk data than just CVEs, including misconfigurations and excessive permissions. 

Unified vulnerability management solutions do not map technical and business relationships. Exposure management adds this broader context to find attack paths leading to crown jewel assets, choke points and remediation steps. In essence, unified vulnerability management focuses on managing every vulnerability. Exposure management shifts the focus from individual findings to understanding toxic risk combinations leading to critical business assets, data and roles that represent true business exposure.

Should I replace my existing vulnerability management tools with a UVM or exposure management solution?

Whether you are adopting a unified vulnerability management solution or an exposure management platform, both integrate with your existing tools and give your organization added value on top of vulnerability management tools. However, UVM solutions can not replace vulnerability management tools because they don’t have direct discovery and assessment capabilities. They aggregate data from existing tools. Exposure management platforms, however, have direct discovery and monitoring capabilities, which support consolidation initiatives to replace redundant tooling with native discovery and monitoring, often at a substantial cost savings.

Can unified vulnerability management support compliance requirements?

예. UVM solutions can aggregate asset and vulnerability management information across different tools and greatly simplify reporting against common compliance frameworks and benchmarks. 

Explore how Tenable One can unify vulnerability management and other security silos, and power a holistic exposure management strategy.