FAQs

If you’re a CISO or part of the Security Operations or GRC team, and you’ve come to the realization that your vulnerability management program is not working the way it should. You’re looking for a solution built for organizations that struggle to make sense of millions of findings from multiple scanners, waste time on false positives, miss the context needed to know what truly matters, and aren’t reducing real risk fast enough. Whether you work for a mid-market company growing fast or a large enterprise with sprawling infrastructure, you’re looking for a solution that can handle diverse assets, high-volume findings, and the operational demands of a mature security program. Tonic sits squarely in that segment, delivering modern, enterprise-ready exposure management.

Tired of all the new cybersecurity acronyms, and just want clarity on what category Tonic actually lives in? Tonic is part of the Unified Exposure Management space, often referred to as CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management). Because Tonic is AI-native and built on agentic AI, it also fits under the emerging category of Agentic Exposure Management or Agentic Vulnerability Management. If you’re looking for a next-generation platform that unifies context, prioritization, and automation, that’s exactly the segment we’re in.

The term Exposure Management is being thrown around a lot lately, and you’re probably wondering how it really compares to traditional Vulnerability Management. Exposure Management is the evolution of Vulnerability Management - broader, smarter, and built for the modern attack surface.

Exposure Management gives you a way to look across your entire hybrid environment, not just software flaws. It brings together all types of findings, unifies visibility across tools and teams, adds the missing business and technical context, and automates the steps needed to reduce real risk faster.

Here’s how it expands on classic Vulnerability Management:

• Broader - It covers the full attack surface: cloud, identities, misconfigurations, external assets, SaaS, shadow IT, and more.
•  Inclusive - It ingests and correlates many types of findings, not only CVEs.
• Unified - It gives you a single, integrated view of exposures across your ecosystem.
• Contextual - It uses business context, ownership, reachability, and exploitability to sharpen prioritization.
• Automated - It accelerates investigation and remediation with AI-driven workflows.

Absolutely. CTEM isn’t a tool, but rather a program built on people, processes, and technology. You’re looking for a platform that actually helps you run that program end-to-end, not just generate more findings. Tonic supports every phase of the CTEM cycle and helps your team operationalize it in a consistent, repeatable way:

1. Scoping - Identify the environments, assets, and business processes that matter most, so your team focuses on what’s truly in play.
2. Discovery - Continuously uncover assets, exposures, misconfigurations, and attack paths across your hybrid environment.
3. Prioritization - Rank exposures using real context: business impact, ownership, reachability, exploitability, and more.
4. Validation - Verify which exposures are actually exploitable and whether your defenses are performing as expected.
5.  Mobilization - Drive coordinated remediation, mitigation, or exception workflows across the right teams - quickly and cleanly.

If you’re building or maturing a CTEM program, Tonic is designed to help you make it a success.

Rather than just dashboards, you want a system that actually works for you. That’s where Tonic’s AI agents come in. They operate behind the scenes to automate the heavy lifting that normally drains your team’s time: correlating data from different tools, resolving ownership, analyzing impact, identifying real attack paths, validating exposures, and driving remediation workflows.

These agents follow clear guardrails, act on structured logic, and surface explainable conclusions so you always understand what they’re doing and why. They’re not endpoint agents, they’re automation and reasoning agents that run inside the platform to make your exposure management program faster, more accurate, and dramatically more efficient.

Tonic’s AI agents act like intelligent teammates who handle the tedious, repetitive work so your team can focus on strategic decisions and real risk reduction.

You’re looking for clarity on how AI is used inside Tonic, and we keep it simple and transparent. Tonic is model-agnostic: we use a mix of leading foundation models from trusted enterprise-grade providers that are fine-tuned and made domain-specific in Tonic. All processing happens under strict security and privacy controls, and your data is never used to train external models. We select the model that best fits the task - accuracy for correlation, speed for automation, reasoning for agentic workflows - while keeping your data protected at all times.

No. Your data is never used to train LLMs. Any AI processing happens within strict security and confidentiality boundaries, and your information stays isolated to your environment. We may use aggregated, de-identified metadata to improve product performance, algorithm accuracy, and detection quality, but never in a way that exposes customer-specific information or contributes to third-party model training.

We hate black boxes as much as you do. Reliability is at the core of Tonic’s knowledge-extraction and correlation engine. From day one, Tonic prioritized accuracy by continuously benchmarking models against proprietary datasets and real-world exposure scenarios. As customers use the platform, the system refines and adapts to their data patterns while keeping data private, which further improves consistency and performance.

That said, AI has natural limitations. To keep you in control, Tonic invests heavily in explainability and confidence signals. Our system makes clear how conclusions are reached and indicates the confidence level of outputs based on parameters such as data volume, freshness, and diversity. This transparency helps customers understand not only what the AI concludes, but also why.

You’re naturally looking for something you can quickly set up and actually use - not months of integration. With Tonic, most teams start seeing clear value in days. Deployment is lightweight, API-driven, and doesn’t require agents or major architectural changes.

Typically, you can connect your core tools (scanners, cloud platforms, identity providers, ticketing, etc.) within a few hours. From there, Tonic immediately begins correlating assets, normalizing data, enriching findings with context, and highlighting high-impact exposures that were previously buried in the noise.

Most customers tell us they see meaningful insights and real risk reduction opportunities  within the first week.

Tonic is built with data quality challenges in mind. Our AI Data Fabric validates and enhances data quality by automatically normalizing, deduplicating, enriching, and correlating data from multiple sources into a security knowledge graph. When data is incomplete or conflicting, Tonic flags uncertainty instead of guessing, and provides confidence indicators so you always understand the reliability of what you’re seeing. AI agents help reconcile ownership, asset relationships, and context using multiple signals rather than relying on any one source.

Tonic retains customer data only as long as it’s needed to deliver the service, support your exposure management workflows, and meet contractual or regulatory obligations. We follow strict data minimization principles, and you can request deletion of data at any time in accordance with your agreement. We also offer configurable retention options for organizations with specific compliance or governance requirements. Bottom line, data is kept only as long as it’s useful and permitted and no more.

No. You’re obviously looking for a platform that delivers value without adding operational overhead, and Tonic is fully agentless. All data is pulled through secure API integrations with the tools and platforms you already use. That means no agents to deploy, no maintenance burden, and no new software to roll out across endpoints or servers.

At the risk of sounding Captain Obvious, we will mention that Tonic does use AI agents inside the platform. These are automation and decision-making agents that operate within Tonic itself, not endpoint agents you need to install.

You get the visibility, context, and prioritization you need, with minimal friction.

It’s important that a platform meets modern security and compliance expectations, and Tonic is hosted in secure, enterprise-grade cloud environments. Tonic runs in the cloud with data residency options available based on your regional or regulatory needs. All customer environments are isolated, encrypted, and aligned with industry best practices to ensure confidentiality and integrity.

Tonic supports various deployment options. By default, and assuming you’re looking for a modern deployment model that’s easy to adopt and maintain, Tonic is delivered as a fully managed SaaS platform. There’s nothing to install, no infrastructure for you to manage, and no upgrades to worry about - everything runs securely in the cloud.

For organizations with strict regulatory or sovereignty requirements, we also support on-premises or hybrid deployment options.

Tonic follows industry best practices and aligns with leading security frameworks. We maintain SOC 2 Type II and ISO27001 compliance, uphold strong data protection controls, and follow secure-by-design principles throughout our platform. We also align with global regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CCPA, and we offer region-specific data residency options to support organizations with local compliance obligations.

In Tonic, a digital asset is any piece of hardware, software, data, or technology infrastructure that is part of your organization’s IT environment and is used for its operations, security, or productivity. These assets can be both tangible (such as servers or mobile devices) and intangible (such as cloud instances or software applications), and constitute anything that stores, processes, transmits, or interacts with data and networks. These assets need to be managed, monitored, and protected to mitigate risks and ensure cybersecurity. If it can be reached, exploited, or misused – whether in the cloud or on-prem - Tonic treats it as a digital asset and brings it into your exposure picture.

Our pricing is predictable, transparent, and aligned to the value you get – not to every scanner, every integration, or to the amount of storage, usage or users. Tonic uses a simple asset-based subscription model. There are no surprise add-ons, no per-finding charges, and no “gotcha” fees for connecting more data sources.

Most customers appreciate that they can start with the footprint they have today and scale as their exposure management program matures. It’s straightforward, flexible, and built to match the way modern security teams actually operate.