How Three CISOs Transformed Their Exposure Management Programs

In an era of increased security breaches and regulatory scrutiny, CISOs and security teams grapple with the pressing questions: Are we reducing risk fast enough, and can we prove it? For Cushman & Wakefield, AdventHealth, and LifeLabs, upleveling their vulnerability management programs was a key component of being able to provide a resounding “yes” to those challenging questions.

Despite being at different points on their exposure management journey, each was able to leverage Zscaler’s Exposure Management solutions to redefine how their organizations identify, prioritize, and remediate the security gaps that matter most.

Cushman & Wakefield: Slashing Vulnerabilities − and the Internal Debates About Them − with Automated, Contextualized Insight

Managing security for a global real estate giant with over 400 offices and 52,000 employees means battling an avalanche of vulnerabilities. For Cushman & Wakefield, old school tools failed to produce insight and often led to confusion. Technical teams were spending hours wading through spreadsheets and conflicting data.

With Zscaler Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM), deduplication and intelligent correlation turned fragmented signals into a single source of actionable truth. Workflows became automated, risk scoring became dynamic, and remediation accelerated for security teams.

CISO Erik Hart, explains “We’re not debating the data anymore. Zscaler UVM automates processes and arms our technical teams with the right information and context so that they can take appropriate and effective action faster. It helps them prioritize by codifying mitigating controls and focusing on the risks that have the highest potential impact.”

James Huntley, Senior Manager of Information Security, recalls the real transformation: “UVM does not just provide a better format… it’s actionable. It tells our teams what to fix and why it matters.”

The bottom line? Less time wasted, more vulnerabilities fixed, and resources focused where they deliver true risk reduction.

“With UVM, we have significantly reduced the total number of vulnerabilities,” explains Erik Hart.

Learn more about Cushman & Wakefield's journey with Zscaler Exposure Management

AdventHealth: Real-Time Visibility That Powers Proactive, Scalable Security

With more than 100,000 employees and over 2,000 care sites, the stakes for the AdventHealth security operations team are sky high. They  identified challenges across visibility and velocity: too many assets, too little clarity, and too much manual effort.

“Actually having an inventory is the very first step,” says Ryan Winn, CISO of AdventHealth. “The Zscaler Data Fabric for Security gives you a shortcut to get there....The biggest surprise for me has been the ability to create meaning out of a massive amount of data and telemetry that we've been collecting.”

By unifying device, user, and application telemetry into a dynamic asset inventory – and leveraging integrations with tools like ServiceNow and Imprivata – AdventHealth can now automate compliance checks, incident response, and user experience monitoring. Countless hours of human effort once spent on manual lookups is being redirected to proactive risk management.

“The possibilities are nearly endless, because we have a lot more visibility than we've ever had before…. we have the ability to secure the environment in a way that was just not doable in our legacy platform,” explains Winn. 

Learn more about AdventHealth's Exposure Management transformation

LifeLabs: Unlocking a Tenfold ROI by Moving Beyond Traditional Vulnerability Management

As Canada’s leading diagnostic laboratory provider, LifeLabs manages the health information of 15 million customers, a responsibility that can put them in the crosshairs of both regulators and adversaries. Yet their vulnerability management program left them frustrated, relying on spreadsheet-driven manual efforts and siloed tools.

Mike Melo, former CISO and VP of IT Shared Services of LifeLabs, describes the turning point: “We needed to get to a place where my team and I could truly map business context to vulnerabilities and drive risk-rated outcomes, and move that needle down based on what is truly exposing us.”

The adoption of Unified Vulnerability Management was revolutionary. Instead of drowning in CVE lists, LifeLabs integrated penetration testing, business logic analysis, and asset criticality, stacking up risk insights from dozens of data sources. The result? Risk reduction, stakeholder alignment, and a dramatic leap in efficiency.

“With Zscaler, we've been able to maximize our ROI and our CTEM journey tenfold,” says Melo. “We've ultimately done and accomplished way more in the past two years than we have in the last seven… UVM is magic for us.”

Melo added, “executives ask: ‘How secure are we? Right now, today?’ To have something like UVM that is dynamically trustworthy allows me to answer that question. I can, at any given time, provide an up-to-date, real-time readout on where our risk is.”

Learn more about how LifeLabs transformed their exposure management program with Zscaler 

A Common Theme: Security Leaders Are Rethinking Exposure Management with Zscaler

Across these stories, security leaders agree: operational efficiency and risk reduction can be unlocked by moving from a mindset of “patch everything” toward one focused on fixing the biggest problems. Zscaler Exposure Management solutions deliver this powerful outcome by unifying siloed technologies, business context, and process automation to get:

• Context-rich insights... not just more data
• Automation that works for you… not the other way around
• Business-aligned risk scoring... not theory
• Board-ready reporting on-demand... no spreadsheets or pivot tables required

For any security leader wondering how to do more with less and prove security value at every level, these organizations are clear proof: It’s possible, and it’s happening today.

Don’t just take our word for it. Mike Melo shares “We can take in all these inputs, contextualize the prioritization, and get a holistic view that is actionable that also takes into account our mitigating controls.”

Is your exposure management unlocking a true risk reduction? Or is it just keeping your team busy playing whack-a-mole? The answer could define your next year in cybersecurity leadership.

Ready to Modernize Your Exposure Management Program?

Request a demo to see first-hand how Zscaler Exposure Management can help you understand all your assets, recognize coverage gaps, determine which exposures put you at the greatest risk, and orchestrate a more efficient remediation process.