Security

How Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Helps Your Business

As organizations confront a more complex security landscape, this security approach is helping businesses reduce risks.

Nathan Eddy works as an independent filmmaker and journalist based in Berlin, specializing in architecture, business technology and healthcare IT. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

For IT security leaders seeking a more forward-looking security posture, continuous threat exposure management offers benefits beyond traditional vulnerability management, helping align security strategies with broader goals and keeping security budgets in check.

In fact, a recent Gartner study reports that organizations that adopt CTEM will be three times less likely to suffer a breach by 2026. Here’s what you need to know:

What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management?

CTEM is a proactive cybersecurity approach that involves the ongoing identification, assessment, prioritization and remediation of security threats and vulnerabilities within an organization, according to Splunk.

It integrates continuous monitoring, automated tools and threat intelligence to keep defenses up to date in the face of evolving threats.

Erik Nost, a senior analyst at Forrester specializing in security and risk, describes CTEM as a new approach that consolidates various proactive security solutions to provide a holistic view of vulnerability, visibility and response orchestration.

“CTEM aligns solutions into one category to enable proactive security,” Nost says. “It evolved to meet today’s complex threat landscapes, unlike traditional vulnerability management.”

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What Are the Benefits of CTEM?

A CTEM approach is holistic. It considers the attack surfaces, attack paths to critical assets and overall risk — giving organizations a clearer sense of how adversaries enter their IT environment.

CTEM also offers businesses a way to stay agile amidst ever-evolving cyber risks.

“As businesses grow and change, their technology environments shift rapidly,” Nost says. “CTEM’s continuous monitoring aligns with these changes, addressing complexities from mergers to cloud-based operations that update daily or hourly, unlike traditional, slower security approaches.”

CTEM enables real-time oversight of potential vulnerabilities, going beyond outdated monthly scans or annual tests.

“By matching the pace of modern business, CTEM supports organizations in safeguarding their dynamic IT architectures, which differ drastically from the stable data centers and long-lived servers of the past,” Nost adds.

A CTEM approach is also iterative, involving the discovery, prioritization and remediation of cyberthreats. It also helps organizations meet security requirements for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, HIPAA or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard by maintaining a continuous, always-on security posture.

What Are the Steps to Building a CTEM Framework?

A CTEM framework typically includes five phases: identification, prioritization, mitigation, validation, and reporting and improvement.

In the first phase, systems are continuously monitored to identify new or emerging vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors. This continuous monitoring is essential to the vulnerability management lifecycle. Identified vulnerabilities are then assessed based on their potential impact on critical assets and business operations.

In the mitigation phase, action is taken to defend against high-risk vulnerabilities by applying patches, reconfiguring systems or adjusting security controls.

The validation stage focuses on testing defenses to ensure vulnerabilities are properly mitigated and the security posture remains strong.

In the final phase of reporting and improvement, IT leaders gain access to security metrics and improved defense routes, based on lessons learned from incident response.

What Is the Difference Between CTEM and Vulnerability Management?

While both CTEM and vulnerability management aim to identify and remediate security weaknesses, they differ in scope and execution. Vulnerability management is more about targeted and periodic identification of vulnerabilities within an organization based on a set scan window.

CTEM, on the other hand, is broader and more comprehensive; it continuously evaluates threats of all kinds. In contrast to traditional vulnerability management, CTEM focuses on proactive security, including continuous visibility, prioritization and remediation across diverse security solutions.

“CTEM consolidates aspects such as attack surface management, security testing and breach simulation into one approach,” Nost explains. “While vulnerability management provides visibility and prioritization, CTEM adds continuous response and orchestration, aggregating data from various tools for a more comprehensive view.”

This approach enables businesses to address threats in real time, rather than relying on siloed, periodic assessments.

With CTEM, businesses benefit from vulnerability management because it is typically baked into the process, but they can also run ongoing attack simulations, monitoring and threat intelligence.

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What Is the Difference Between CTEM and SIEM?

Security information and event management, or SIEM, is a tool or system used to collect, analyze and report on security data across the organizational IT environment.

CTEM takes a proactive approach to security, focusing on identifying structural weaknesses to prevent incidents before they occur, Nost says, while SIEM is reactive, monitoring and analyzing situational data to detect and respond to security events in real time.

“CTEM is about reducing the workload on SIEM by preemptively addressing vulnerabilities,” he says.

Together, CTEM and SIEM can create a balanced defense: CTEM reduces risks that SIEM would otherwise need to address.

“The more proactive you are, the less reactive you ultimately need to be,” Nost says.

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