Last week, we released The Forrester Wave™: Proactive Security Platforms, Q3 2026. This is the first evaluation of this market under this title, which has evolved from attack surface management and unified vulnerability management.

Security teams have increasingly turned to vulnerability risk management, attack surface management, and exposure management to decide which weaknesses matter most. Prioritization is absolutely necessary, but it’s only an intermediate step, because a prioritized vulnerability that nobody fixes is still a vulnerability.

That’s why action is becoming the new center of gravity for proactive security. Over the past three years, we have framed proactive security as a progression from visibility to prioritization to remediation. Our latest evaluation brings vulnerability management and attack surface management together under that broader proactive security platform use case.

Vendors are moving in the same direction. Every vendor in our evaluation presented a strategy focused on moving customers from identifying and prioritizing exposures toward taking action. Organizations must prioritize, since it is not possible to remediate everything simultaneously. But visibility and prioritization without remediation doesn’t improve security.

And despite broad agreement on that destination, the 12 vendors we evaluated show meaningful differences in how they get there. This is why I always tell clients to not start with the leaderboard. Start with your current- and future-state procedures, characteristics of your environment, understanding the context that you’re missing, and how you need to orchestrate remediations. Proactive security platforms differ in asset depth, contextual intelligence, exposure validation, and remediation capabilities. Their strengths reflect their heritage in cloud security, vulnerability management, endpoint management, security operations, or workflow orchestration.

Choose the platform with strengths that match how your organization finds, prioritizes, owns, and remediates risk. Don’t focus on a platform that finds the most problems — choose the one that helps your organization fix the right ones at scale.

Forrester clients can read the full report now: The Forrester Wave™: Proactive Security Platforms, Q3 2026. If you have any questions about the changes happening in the proactive security market, book an inquiry or guidance session with me.

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