If your business has added new tools, users, or partners over the years, your attack surface has grown whether you planned for it or not. Companies rarely stand still. Cloud services, SaaS platforms, remote work, and vendor integrations all bring speed and flexibility, but they also create more places where systems connect and data flows.
So what does your attack surface actually look like today – and how would you begin to reduce it? For many organizations, growth spreads assets across teams, platforms, and providers faster than visibility can keep up. Ownership blurs, inventories age out, and exposure becomes harder to measure. This is where attack surface reduction shifts from a technical exercise to a practical business discipline: understanding what exists, deciding what truly needs to be accessible, and tightening everything else.
The Business Reality Behind an Expanding Attack Surface
- 73% of security leaders report incidents caused by unknown or unmanaged assets, showing how quickly visibility falls behind growth.
- 30% more internet‑facing assets exist than most organizations have documented, creating blind spots that are easy to overlook.
- 300+ new services per month are added to the average organization as cloud platforms and APIs scale faster than inventories are updated
- 20% of breaches now begin with exploitation of vulnerabilities tied to exposed or poorly tracked systems, not sophisticated attack methods.
- 15% of breaches involve third parties, reflecting how vendors, SaaS tools, and hybrid environments continually reshape the threat landscape.
Understanding and managing the attack surface is therefore less about reacting to threats and more about maintaining control as the business evolves.
Types of Attack Surfaces
Every organization has more than one attack surface. The real advantage comes from understanding where each one shows up in everyday operations and how it expands as the business grows.
External Attack Surface
The external attack surface includes anything about your business that can be reached from the internet. This typically covers public‑facing websites, cloud services, APIs, remote access portals, and exposed infrastructure.
Ever Googled your own company lately?
Ever Googled your own company lately? External exposure often grows quietly as teams launch new services, add cloud resources, or enable remote access to move faster. Over time, organizations can lose track of how many internet‑facing assets they actually have, even when nothing was intentionally misconfigured.
Internal Attack Surface
The internal attack surface lives inside the organization. It includes systems and services accessed by employees, contractors, and trusted partners, such as internal applications, endpoints, shared services, and internal networks.
What happens once someone is already inside?
Internal exposure shapes how issues move through the business. How systems are connected, monitored, and owned internally often determines whether a problem stays contained or spreads. Clear asset visibility supports smoother operations and helps maintain compliance as environments change.
Cloud and Third‑Party Exposure
Cloud platforms and third‑party providers are now central to how businesses operate. Every SaaS application, vendor connection, and integrated service becomes part of the broader attack surface.
How many vendors still have access they no longer need?
Third‑party exposure often sits outside day‑to‑day IT oversight while still affecting critical workflows. Access accumulates as tools are added and contracts evolve. Staying aware of these relationships is essential for keeping long‑term risk exposure in check.
A Step‑by‑Step Approach to Attack Surface Reduction
Attack surface reduction does not need to be complex to be effective. The most successful teams follow a simple, repeatable flow they can come back to as the business grows.
1. Asset Discovery
First, get the full picture.
Start by identifying everything connected to the organization. Internal systems. External services. Cloud resources. Vendor access. All of it.
If you had to name every connected asset today, could you?
Most exposure starts with what no one realizes is there. Clear asset visibility gives teams a shared starting point and removes guesswork from every decision that follows.
2. Risk Prioritization
Next, decide what actually matters.
Not every asset carries the same weight. Some systems support core operations. Others are nice to have. Prioritization is about understanding exposure, business impact, and importance.
What would cause real disruption if it failed or was misused?
This step keeps teams focused. Instead of trying to fix everything at once, effort goes where it delivers the most reduction in risk.
3. Hardening Systems
Then, tighten with intent.
Hardening means reducing unnecessary exposure. Remove what is no longer used. Limit access that no longer makes sense. Align configurations with how systems are used today.
Is this still needed in its current form?
This is not about locking things down blindly. It is about matching systems to reality. When usage and access align, gaps shrink naturally.
4. Continuous Monitoring
Finally, keep watching.
The environment will change. New tools get added. Access shifts. Vendors rotate. Monitoring ensures visibility keeps pace with growth.
How would you know if something new appeared tomorrow?
Continuous monitoring turns attack surface reduction into an ongoing habit, not a one‑time effort.
Managing Attack Surface Reduction with iwx
Most organizations don’t struggle with effort – they struggle with sprawl. Tools multiply, access accumulates, and visibility gets harder to maintain as the business moves forward.
That’s the space iwx operates in. As a Microsoft partner, iwx helps teams bring structure to attack surface reduction using familiar Microsoft technologies, focusing on clarity, consistency, and progress over perfection. It’s about reducing exposure in a way that fits how the business actually runs – without adding another layer of tools or processes.
References:
https://www.ivanti.com/blog/attack-surface-discovery
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/security-101/what-is-attack-surface-management
https://www.breachsense.com/blog/attack-surface-management/