In an exclusive conversation with CXO Media and APAC Media, Rajnish Gupta, Managing Director and Country Manager, Tenable India highlights how its unified exposure management platform consolidates data from native and third-party tools and offers a contextualized view of risk across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
Could you walk us through Tenable’s current portfolio in India, including key products and services, especially those focused on exposure management and cloud security?
Tenable One is our comprehensive Exposure Management Platform. It empowers organizations to gain complete visibility across their entire modern attack surface, enabling them to focus resources on preventing likely attacks and accurately communicate cyber risk to drive better business decisions. By combining the broadest vulnerability coverage spanning IT, OT, IoT, cloud, containers, web apps, and identity systems with the insights from Tenable Research and powerful analytics, Tenable One helps organizations gain comprehensive visibility across the modern attack surface, anticipate threats and prioritize efforts to prevent attacks and communicate cyber risk to make better decisions.Â
The platform now includes Tenable One Connectors and customizable risk dashboards, allowing organizations to integrate third-party data sources and unify disparate security insights. This consolidation of native and external data provides a contextualized view of risk across the attack surface, improving operational efficiency and supporting informed decision-making. Tenable Cloud Security offers a holistic, actionable platform that enables organizations to quickly expose and close priority security gaps in the cloud and remediate risky entitlements and vulnerabilities. It identifies and eliminates cloud exposures at scale for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments across infrastructure, workloads, identities, and data. This includes AI-powered insights into access, resources, and datasets. The solution also integrates with the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform to continuously identify threats across the entire attack surface.Â
What are the major pillars of Tenable’s go-to-market strategy in India and the SAARC region? Could you highlight any recent initiatives driving growth or deeper market penetration?
As technology, particularly AI, becomes increasingly accessible, organizations are rapidly integrating it into their infrastructure and products. This widespread adoption leads to data being distributed across a more complex landscape of locations, accounts, and applications, consequently creating new security and infrastructure challenges. This evolving landscape underscores the critical need to shift from traditional vulnerability management to a more proactive exposure management approach. Exposure management empowers organizations to understand where they are exposed to risk, assess the implications of that risk, and effectively manage and reduce it.
Against this backdrop, Tenable’s go-to-market strategy is firmly built on a channel-first business model. This strategic approach facilitates the delivery of tailored cybersecurity solutions through a structured partner ecosystem. In 2025, Tenable further strengthened this commitment by enhancing its Tenable Assure Partner Program. This updated program offers greater flexibility, more robust technical support, and expanded business opportunities, specifically designed to reward the investments of reseller and distributor partners while simultaneously fostering the development of a predictable annuity stream through renewals.
How is Tenable’s partner ecosystem structured in India, and what role do alliances play in expanding your cybersecurity footprint across sectors?
Tenable’s partner ecosystem is designed to equip partners with the essential tools and support needed to deliver exposure management solutions across diverse sectors. To facilitate this, we provide partners with a range of resources aimed at developing revenue streams, including opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, advanced training, comprehensive go-to-market campaign support, and access to vital technical and sales tools.Â
Additionally, partners benefit from deal registration discounts and performance-aligned incentives, fostering mutual accountability and strong business alignment. Strategic alliances with these channel partners are crucial for expanding Tenable’s cybersecurity footprint across various sectors. Our channel partners are evolving into trusted advisors, helping organizations identify and address critical cyber exposure gaps. They play a pivotal role in delivering Tenable’s exposure management platform across multi-cloud environments and ensuring full-stack risk assessment at scale. Through continuous investment in training and collaborative engagement, Tenable ensures that its partner ecosystem remains highly capable of securing modern attack surfaces within India’s dynamic threat landscape.
In a competitive cybersecurity landscape, how does Tenable uniquely differentiate itself from players like Qualys, Rapid7, or others in the vulnerability management space?
Tenable distinguishes itself in the vulnerability management landscape by offering a unified exposure management approach that surpasses traditional scanning and reporting. Its platform provides comprehensive visibility by analyzing and correlating data from diverse sources, a capability often lacking in other tools.
The platform consolidates data from native and third-party tools, offering a contextualized view of risk across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. This shifts organizations from siloed vulnerability data to integrated, business-aligned intelligence, enabling more effective remediation planning by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on real-time risk and potential business impact. Furthermore, Tenable addresses emerging threat vectors by enabling organizations to manage exposure related to both the use and development of AI systems. This is a crucial differentiator, as traditional solutions often overlook the new misconfiguration and data leakage risks introduced by cloud-based AI.
What are the changes in conversations with CISOs that you are witnessing today?
Recent conversations with CISOs reveal a distinct shift from traditional vulnerability management towards comprehensive exposure management. A primary concern is the expanding gap between the rapid adoption of AI and cloud technologies and the comparatively slower implementation of robust security controls.
CISOs are increasingly highlighting the vulnerability of cloud AI, citing security gaps that risk data exposure and service manipulation. They acknowledge that many organizations have only partially addressed their AI-related security deficiencies, leaving critical assets exposed. Furthermore, the challenges posed by fragmented visibility, a direct result of multiple siloed security tools, are complicating detection and response efforts. Consequently, CISOs are prioritizing unified exposure management strategies that offer proactive risk identification and mitigation across both cloud infrastructure and AI systems. Beyond this, CISOs are also keenly focused on navigating the complex and often fragmented regulatory requirements prevalent across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, seeking solutions that ensure compliance while effectively managing emerging cyber threats.
What are the biggest challenges for enterprises in working with a managed security services model?Â
Enterprises working with managed security service providers (MSSPs) often face two primary challenges.
First, many MSSPs struggle to align their services with the enterprise’s unique IT architecture. This misalignment can lead to security gaps, delayed deployments and operational disruptions, reducing the overall effectiveness of the MSS model.
Second, most MSSPs offer standardized, one-size-fits-all solutions that do not account for the enterprise’s unique risk profile, regulatory requirements or operational priorities. This results in either inadequate protection or over-provisioned resource allocation, reducing ROI and leaving critical vulnerabilities unaddressed.
Tenable’s MSSP program is designed to address these limitations by enabling flexible, scalable delivery of exposure management solutions tailored to each environment. It supports deep integration, customized deployments and contextual risk prioritization, ensuring MSSPs can deliver measurable outcomes that align with the enterprise’s security and compliance needs.
What is the ratio between your greenfield and brownfield customers?
Tenable has 44,000 customers worldwide. This includes more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500, and over 40 percent of the Global 2000.
Are there any recent product innovations or strategic business shifts that reflect Tenable’s evolving approach to addressing emerging cyber risks in India?
Tenable’s take on emerging cyber risks is reflected in recent enhancements to the Tenable One platform, including third-party connectors and customizable risk dashboards, which unify and contextualize risk data across environments. The acquisition of Apex Security extends the platform’s capabilities to include AI risk governance, addressing vulnerabilities in both deployed and developed AI systems.
Bhavya Bagga, APAC Media
