In an email interview with CIOAXIS, Rajnish Gupta, Managing Director & Country Manager, Tenable India, shares his insight on the various aspects of cyber security, cloud security, exposure management, and proactive risk mitigation…
1. Could you give us an overview of Tenable’s latest offerings in India, highlighting the core services and products which are related to cloud security and exposure management?
Following its acquisition of Vulcan Cyber, Tenable has enhanced its Tenable One platform with new connectors and customizable risk dashboards. By integrating data from over 300 third-party tools, Tenable One provides a unified, contextual view of all security risks, breaking down data silos and improving operational efficiency. This transforms scattered exposure insights into actionable, business-aligned intelligence.
Separately, Tenable Cloud Security replaces siloed products that generate excessive alerts and false positives. It offers a holistic view of cloud-native application health, integrating both cloud infrastructure and application security. With built-in DSPM and AI-SPM capabilities, it also helps organizations reduce the significant risks associated with cloud-based AI deployments.
2. In terms of exposure management, how can Tenable empower organizations to gain complete visibility across their entire modern attack surface and enable CIOs to make better business decisions?
Most organizations manage diverse, siloed IT environments spanning on-prem, cloud, and OT, which obscures a complete view of vulnerabilities. The Tenable One platform addresses this by aggregating data through connectors to create a unified view of the entire attack surface.
What makes Tenable One unique is Exposure Signals, which provide sophisticated, actionable risk indicators beyond generic CVSS scores. For example, a signal might flag a critical vulnerability on a business-critical server that is publicly accessible and actively exploited, immediately elevating its priority. This allows security leaders to shift from a reactive “patch everything” approach to a strategic, risk-based methodology that effectively reduces cyber risk.
3. How can CISOs come up with mitigation strategies and actions which can secure the cloud environment against security threats posed by determined and highly motivated attackers?
In today’s cloud environments, misconfigurations, privileged access and vulnerabilities are dangerous on their own, but the combinations are what lead to catastrophic breaches. Highly motivated attackers often leverage these toxic combinations of critically vulnerable, overly privileged and publicly exposed assets, to attack cloud environments. Modern attack surfaces need to move beyond patching and yearly audits to proactively identifying, understanding, and mitigating risks, not just in cloud infrastructure, but also in the AI systems that increasingly power innovation and decision-making.
To gain visibility into multi-cloud environments, organisations should adopt unified platforms that offer agentless scanning of cloud workloads in runtime, integrate code-to-cloud visibility and offer exposure-aware prioritisation of mitigating vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Misconfigured assets, open ports or overexposed resources make cloud workloads attackable from the internet. Implement tools that constantly monitor the cloud network, automatically detect public access and provide risk scores based on combined exposure and vulnerability context, including likelihood of exploitation. This helps them see the entire attack path.
4. Could you elaborate on the strategy and approach of Tenable in terms of driving growth and increasing the market share in India?
Our growth strategy in India is focused on three pillars: our partners, our platform, and our value. First, as a 100% channel-driven business, we are empowering our local Indian partners to meet the market’s surging demand. Second, we directly address CISO tool fatigue with Tenable One, a unified platform that consolidates risk into a single source of truth. Finally, we deliver clear business value by using AI to provide prioritized, actionable guidance—not just more alerts—and offer executive-level risk quantification to help leaders justify their security investments to the board.
5. For strengthening cloud security, how can AI-powered exposure management enhance threat detection, simplify security operations, and enable proactive risk mitigation?
Tenable’s AI-powered exposure management approach revolutionizes cloud security through the Tenable One platform. It enhances threat detection by using AI-driven Attack Path Analysis and Predictive Prioritization, allowing teams to visualize and focus on the exploitable pathways posing the greatest risk to cloud assets. The platform simplifies security operations by unifying data from cloud, IT, and web apps into a single, contextualized view. This provides a comprehensive understanding of the entire attack surface, enabling proactive risk mitigation by discovering and remediating security gaps before they can be exploited.
6. How can Indian enterprises take proactive steps and devise risk-based strategies for building a resilient cloud security posture?
The “toxic cloud triad”, a combination of exploitable vulnerabilities, overly permissive identities, and exposed sensitive data, is a critical threat present in nearly one-third of global organizations. To stay resilient, organizations must get the security basics right. This requires moving beyond severity scores to prioritize vulnerabilities based on actual exploitability and exposure. Comprehensive security involves scanning both static code and live cloud assets and continuously monitoring all IAM roles and users to eliminate unused credentials and excessive permissions.
Adopt security tools that automatically identify these toxic combinations and visualize attack paths. By prioritizing real-world exploitation potential over theoretical risk—as Tenable Cloud Security does by ranking toxic trilogies as top risks—security teams can mitigate the most critical threats first and achieve more effective risk reduction.