It also means carving out space for this work in how you prioritize. If strategic efforts like attack surface reduction are always competing against urgent patching, they will always lose. That might mean setting aside time each quarter to review and reduce exposure, or assigning clear ownership so someone is accountable for it — not just when a crisis hits, but routinely.

3. Continuous monitoring

Attack surface reduction isn’t a one-time exercise. Exposure changes constantly — a firewall rule gets edited, a new service gets deployed, a subdomain gets forgotten — and your team needs to detect those changes quickly.