Cybersecurity teams today face a tough reality: the attack surface is growing faster than ever, threats are becoming more sophisticated, and even with a stack of tools in place, breaches still happen.
Gartner reports that only 17% of organizations can identify most of their assets, and by 2026, organizations using Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) could cut breaches by two-thirds. That’s not a small improvement; it’s a game-changer.
But CTEM isn’t a new shiny tool you can buy off the shelf. It’s a strategic, ongoing approach to identifying, validating, and reducing the threats and exposures that really matter to your business. Done right, it helps you focus your security resources where they’ll have the most impact. Done wrong or not at all, and your risk grows quietly until it’s too late.
In Kudelski Security’s recent webinar, Strengthen Security Before It Breaks: Real-World Tactics to Reduce Risk, we unpacked how CTEM works in practice, why it’s essential today, and how to start building it into your security strategy.
The Problem: Expanding Attack Surfaces, Overwhelmed Teams
The modern enterprise doesn’t just operate within four walls. Remote work, SaaS adoption, complex supply chains, and cloud-first development have exploded the number of systems, accounts, and connections you need to protect.
This expansion creates two critical problems:
- Blind spots – You can’t defend what you can’t see. With so many moving parts, most organizations struggle to maintain a clear inventory of assets and their associated risks.
- Lack of prioritization – Even when vulnerabilities are found, security teams often lack the business context to know which ones matter most.
The result? Security teams are stuck in reactive mode, chasing alerts, patching low-risk vulnerabilities, and missing the high-impact issues that adversaries are most likely to exploit.
Why CTEM Matters Now
CTEM is about continuously assessing both your threats and your exposures and acting on that insight in a targeted way. Think of it as the bridge between security operations and business priorities. It’s not just about finding flaws; it’s about knowing which flaws create real business risk and fixing those first.
As defined by Gartner, CTEM programs work through two main phases:
- Diagnose – Define the scope, discover what you have, understand your threats, and prioritize based on risk.
- Act – Validate that your controls work as intended, remediate gaps, and monitor your posture over time.
At Kudelski Security, we see CTEM not as an optional add-on but as a core pillar of modern cybersecurity. Without it, security investments are scattershot, and risk reduction is hit-or-miss.
Step One: Scope and Discovery
Most organizations already have tools that tell them something about their assets, such as vulnerability scanners, endpoint detection, and SIEMs. The challenge is connecting those dots into a single, trustworthy picture.
Scoping starts with business alignment:
- What are your most critical business processes?
- Which assets support them?
- What threats could realistically disrupt them?
Without this understanding, security work happens in a vacuum, disconnected from what matters most to the organization.
Discovery then builds the inventory. It’s about seeing beyond just “what’s on the network” to include context: ownership, criticality, and exposure.
Step Two: Prioritize What Matters Most
Not all risks are created equal. CTEM pushes you to focus on vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that are:
- On critical assets
- Exposed to known active threats in your sector or geography
- Missing key security controls
For example, a vulnerability on a public-facing server used in a key revenue stream is far more urgent than the same flaw on a dormant lab machine.
This prioritization not only sharpens your security focus but also ensures you use your people, time, and budget where they’ll have the biggest impact.
Step Three: Validate and Act
The “continuous” in CTEM matters. Threat actor tactics evolve, so controls that worked yesterday may fail tomorrow.
Validation means testing your existing defenses against current threats, not just in theory but in practice. That could mean simulating attacks, reviewing security tool configurations, and verifying that layered defenses are actually in place.
Once gaps are identified, remediation can be targeted and efficient. The goal isn’t to fix everything, but to close the most dangerous exposures first.
Breaking Down the IT–Business Disconnect
A recurring theme in our webinar was the importance of bridging the gap between IT/security teams and the rest of the business.
Too often, security decisions are made without a deep understanding of how the organization actually operates. Conversely, business leaders don’t always see how cyber risks map to operational risks.
Simple steps such as having IT and security staff visit manufacturing plants or retail operations can spark critical conversations. Sometimes, you find a cyber risk can be mitigated by an existing manual process, saving significant investment. Other times, the visit reveals dependencies and vulnerabilities no one had considered.
Making the Most of the Tools You Already Own
One of the most eye-opening parts of CTEM adoption is realizing how underused many security tools are. In our experience:
- Tools may not cover all relevant assets.
- Features that could reduce risk are disabled or unconfigured.
- Overlaps and redundancies waste budget.
By correlating data from all your tools, including endpoint, network, identity, and cloud, you can spot gaps and improve coverage without buying anything new. This isn’t just cost efficiency; it’s risk reduction. Gartner estimates that over 60% of breaches involve misconfigured or poorly deployed security tools.
Measuring and Communicating Risk
CTEM also improves how you report on cybersecurity to executives and boards. Instead of drowning them in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and IP addresses, you can talk in terms of:
- “Our finance systems are currently exposed to phishing risk.”
- “We’ve reduced ransomware exposure by 30% over the last quarter.”
This business-focused reporting builds trust, makes the case for investment, and keeps security aligned with organizational goals.
Your Next Move
The key takeaway from our discussion: you can start small. Scope your most critical business area, map its assets, identify the most urgent threats, and take action. Build from there.
Whether you’re a CISO looking to rationalize your security stack, a security manager trying to operationalize MITRE ATT&CK, or a business leader seeking better visibility into risk, CTEM provides a proven framework for making security measurable and effective.
If you’d like to see what CTEM could look like in your organization and how Kudelski Security can help you reduce risk before it becomes a breach, you can watch the full webinar here: Strengthen Security Before It Breaks: Real-World Tactics to Reduce Risk.
If you’re ready to talk through your specific priorities, contact our team today.
