How CTEM Boosts Visibility and Shrinks Attack Surfaces in Hybrid and Cloud Environments

How CTEM Boosts Visibility and Shrinks Attack Surfaces in Hybrid and Cloud Environments

CTEM is a continuous strategy that assesses risk from an attacker’s view, helping organizations prioritize threats across cloud and hybrid environments. The attack surface has exploded. Between multi-cloud deployments, remote endpoints, SaaS platforms, shadow IT, and legacy infrastructure, the perimeter has not only become unrecognizable; in many ways, it no longer exists.

For security teams, this complexity makes it nearly impossible to answer the most critical questions with confidence: Where are we exposed? What matters most? Which fixes should we start with?

CTEM: A New Way to Answer These Questions

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a new way to answer these questions. CTEM is a strategy that aims to continuously assess, validate, and remediate an organization’s exposure across all environments. It helps organizations prioritize what matters most by understanding how attackers think.

What is CTEM? And Why Does It Matter?

CTEM isn’t another dashboard or scanning engine. It’s an operational approach that continuously evaluates your infrastructure from the attacker’s perspective. It connects the dots between misconfigurations, identity risks, unpatched vulnerabilities, and internet-exposed assets, providing a unified view of your risk posture.

Instead of focusing on raw CVE counts or siloed asset scans, CTEM emphasizes understanding what is exploitable, right now, in your environment. That information is crucial for protecting yourself.

Why is CTEM Critical in Cloud and Hybrid Environments?

As noted, cloud and hybrid environments have made security exponentially more complicated to manage. The very things that make the cloud attractive – scalability, decentralization, and speed – also introduce major blind spots.

Here’s why CTEM is tailor-made for cloud-first organizations: Traditional asset management tools struggle to keep track of ephemeral cloud instances, microservices, and containers. CTEM, however, continuously maps and monitors this dynamic infrastructure, linking assets, identities, permissions, and vulnerabilities into one contextual view.

Exposure Management

Exposure management also helps organizations break down siloes across tools and teams by consolidating risk data into a unified source, supporting better coordination between security, IT, and business stakeholders.

In modern environments, identities, not devices, are the primary attack surface. Over-permissioned roles, machine identities, and federated access are common weak points. CTEM helps pinpoint these identity-based exposures and map how an attacker could abuse them.

What Problems Does CTEM Solve for Security Teams?

Most organizations run vulnerability scans, use SIEMs, and follow basic security best practices. But even with these controls, siloed tools, complex environments, and an unprecedentedly treacherous threat landscape mean security teams must grapple with:

  • Cybersecurity fatigue from an overwhelming number of alerts
  • Difficulty in prioritizing threats based on real-world risk
  • Inability to link together disparate data sources for a comprehensive view of the attack surface

CTEM solves these problems by acting as a connective tissue. It brings together siloed risk signals and reorients them around real-world attack paths, helping teams cut through the noise and focus on what’s exploitable and urgent.

Real-World Results

According to research from Tenable, organizations that adopt a CTEM-based exposure management strategy can see:

  • A 10x improvement in asset visibility
  • A 75% reduction in time spent normalizing exposure data
  • Up to 82% fewer remediation tickets

The Future of Cloud Security

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 70% of enterprises will adopt CTEM platforms. As hybrid and cloud environments blur traditional perimeters and regulatory pressure increases, CTEM offers clarity.

CTEM unifies visibility, aligns remediation with real-world risk, and helps teams focus on what actually matters. It’s the next – and necessary – evolution in how we think about cybersecurity.