What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?
What’s inside?
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a term coined by Gartner to describe a security program where an organization works to continuously identify, prioritize, and remediate security risks across its attack surface. This differs from traditional vulnerability management practices, where vulnerability scanners provide a snapshot of the organization’s security posture. Additionally, these scanners focus on vulnerabilities while overlooking other risks, such as misconfigurations.
CTEM is increasingly critical as cyberattacks grow more sophisticated and common. Deploying as part of an integrated Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform offers the visibility and control that organizations need across their entire IT environment.
Why Continuous Threat Exposure Management Matters
Traditional, static security assessments are no longer effective at managing cyber risk exposure. The growth of DevOps and cloud computing means that IT environments are constantly changing, and hybrid and cloud environments introduce additional security challenges and risks. At the same time, the bar for security has never been higher. As cybercriminals grow more sophisticated and use tools like AI and automation, attacks are faster than ever. Failing to manage these threats carries a heavy price for the business, in terms of data breaches, compliance fines, and other costs.
CTEM offers continuous visibility and control over an organization’s attack surface. This allows organizations to more quickly address potential gaps, improving resiliency, decreasing risk exposure, and enhancing compliance.
The Core Stages of CTEM
CTEM is a continuous cyclical process that Gartner breaks into five main stages: scoping, discovery & assessment, validation, remediation & prioritization, and continuous monitoring. While these are discrete stages, organizations move through them iteratively and continuously to manage their exposure to evolving threats.
Core Stages of CTEM
Scoping
The scoping stage defines the set of devices, apps, users, cloud workloads, and third-party integrations that will be managed by CTEM. Defining this scope is important because it prevents efforts from being diluted by too broad and efficient of a scope.
For example, scoping may identify a critical SaaS application or the company’s remote workforce as the target scope. From there, the organization can work to develop a strategy while taking into account potential challenges, such as the ephemeral nature of cloud-based assets and the potential use of unmanaged devices by remote workers.
Discovery & Assessment
During the discovery and assessment stage, the CTEM function works to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures within the scoped environment. Discovery and assessment are complementary since discovery offers a comprehensive (and unmanageable) list, while assessment narrows it to items that pose a real risk to the business.
Ideally, assessment will prioritize findings based on potential business impacts and exploitability. Doing so requires deep visibility into and understanding of the organization’s environment so that the CTEM system can identify and map critical assets and workflows and accurately assess the impact of a potential vulnerability upon them.
Validation
Vulnerability scanners and similar tools identify many vulnerabilities that aren’t actually exploitable or don’t pose a real risk to the business. Red teaming, penetration testing, and automated attack simulations are tools used to help identify those exposures that an attacker could actually exploit.
This validation stage is critical to prevent resources from being wasted on low-impact issues. For example, if a misconfiguration requires an authenticated session to exploit, it poses less of a real risk if the organization has strong user authentication, access management, and session monitoring in place.
Remediation & Prioritization
The remediation and prioritization stage focuses on fixing identified vulnerabilities and exposure via patches, policy changes, and configuration fixes. This process should be structured so that the highest-risk issues are addressed first.
Automation and unified management and enforcement are essential to remediate exposures rapidly and at scale. Without them, remediation is too slow, and security teams struggle to scale to address all high-risk vulnerabilities.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring closes the CTEM loop and feeds back into the scoping stage. As an organization’s IT infrastructure and cyberattacks evolve, the threats it faces change as well. For example, a new application or app update could introduce vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that should be addressed via a new CTEM cycle.
Monitoring efforts should include elements such as network traffic analysis, anomaly detection, and alerting. According to Gartner, monitoring should be an ongoing process covering the entirety of an organization’s environment.
How CTEM Differs from Traditional Vulnerability Management
Unlike traditional vulnerability management, CTEM is a continuous process that takes a business-centric approach to exposure identification and management. By moving beyond scanning to continuous monitoring, businesses gain the visibility needed to address the most pressing concerns at the present moment, not those from hours or days in the past.
CTEM vs. Traditional Vulnerability Management
How Cato Networks Supports Continuous Threat Exposure Management
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform enables organizations to operationalize CTEM by providing unified visibility and threat management across an organization’s entire IT environment. Cato converges network and security functions into a single, unified platform, eliminating potential silos and ensuring that the tools needed to detect, prioritize, and remediate exposures are all available within a single dashboard.
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform continuously monitors traffic, applications, and users across the corporate WAN to identify signs of potential threats or exploitation. Cloud-delivered protections within a Security Service Edge (SSE) framework also enable real-time enforcement, blocking threats as they emerge. This visibility and granular control enable effective CTEM without the need for standalone tools or bolt-on features.
Why Continuous Threat Exposure Management Is Essential for Modern Security
As cyber threats grow and mature, constant visibility and control are vital to identify and remediate exposures before they can be exploited by an attacker. CTEM reduces an organization’s risk of breaches, enhances regulatory compliance, and optimizes the allocation of limited security resources.
According to Gartner, CTEM is a best practice that will soon become mainstream across industries. Additionally, by implementing CTEM, companies achieve the visibility and control required to avoid security gaps that risk non-compliance with regulations and standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, and expose them to legal suits or compliance fines.
Benefits of CTEM Adoption
Unlike many CTEM providers, Cato builds CTEM capabilities into its unified global SASE platform. Continuous, comprehensive monitoring enables an organization to both address vulnerabilities and work to continuously validate and improve its security posture.
CTEM is the future of exposure management; ongoing, business-driven, and necessary to stay resilient. Cato makes CTEM practical and scalable for organizations of all sizes by offering it as a feature of its unified SASE platform. Request a demo to see how Cato’s SASE platform makes CTEM practical and continuously reduces risk.
FAQ
What is the difference between CTEM and vulnerability management?
Traditional vulnerability management uses periodic scans to identify vulnerabilities in applications. CTEM implements continuous monitoring and prioritized remediation of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures. This wider view and more agile approach are essential to manage the evolving threats that companies face.
Who introduced Continuous Threat Exposure Management?
Gartner introduced the concept of CTEM in 2022 to help companies move from periodic scans to continuous security monitoring and exposure management. In their view, CTEM is a best practice for security teams to manage evolving risks and compliance requirements.
What are the benefits of adopting CTEM?
CTEM enables organizations to reduce their attack surface, enhance compliance, and more efficiently use limited security resources by focusing on validated, high-risk exposures. As a result, companies have fewer breaches, better resilience, and more efficient security operations.
How does CTEM integrate with zero trust or SASE?
CTEM decreases an organization’s digital attack surface, while zero trust reduces exposures through Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) enforcement and blocks an attacker’s ability to access and exploit vulnerable applications. CTEM also integrates with SASE, offering the visibility needed for SASE to close identified security gaps via real-time enforcement.
How does Cato make CTEM practical for enterprises?
Cato’s unified SASE platform continuously monitors traffic, users, and applications in real time. Its converged platform simplifies exposure management by consolidating tools and eliminating silos and visibility gaps. By providing key CTEM capabilities as part of its platform, Cato enables enterprises to operationalize CTEM at scale.