What is cloud threat exposure management (CTEM)?

CTEM is a structured, continuous process for identifying and mitigating security exposures within an organization’s digital environment. The primary objective of CTEM is to provide consistent visibility into exploitable risks and support timely remediation aligned with organizational priorities.

Key characteristics of CTEM

A CTEM program typically integrates multiple domains of security operations, including asset discovery, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and incident response. By doing so, CTEM helps organizations prioritize and act on exposures that are most likely to be exploited and most impactful to business operations.

A CTEM program operates with a few defining characteristics that distinguish it from older, checklist-style security approaches:

• Continuous assessment: Automates continuous discovery of digital assets and vulnerabilities.
• Business-aligned prioritization: Focuses efforts based on risk to critical assets, not just CVSS scores.
• Threat-informed: Integrates threat intelligence and attacker behavior into exposure analysis.
• Validates exploitability: Confirms which threats are realistically exploitable before triggering remediation.
• Operational integration: Engages the right stakeholders (developers, cloud teams, product owners) to act on exposure insights.

Core phases of CTEM implementation

CTEM is not a single tool or product. It’s a framework built around five key phases:

1. Scoping

The first phase involves identifying the assets, environments, and business functions that fall within the scope of the program. This may include internal infrastructure, cloud services, SaaS applications, development environments, and supply chain dependencies.

2. Discovery

In this phase, the organization collects information about the identified assets, including known and unknown vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, weak credentials, and external exposures. Continuous asset inventory and vulnerability scanning are foundational components of discovery.

3. Prioritization

Once exposures are identified, they are evaluated for urgency and business impact. Factors include asset criticality, potential for exploitation, availability of compensating controls, and alignment with threat intelligence. The goal is to distinguish between theoretical risks and those requiring immediate attention.

4. Validation

This phase assesses whether prioritized exposures can be realistically exploited. Techniques such as attack path analysis, adversary emulation, and breach and attack simulation (BAS) may be employed. Validation helps ensure that remediation efforts focus on exposures that represent actual, not hypothetical, threats.

5. Mobilization

Finally, remediation plans are executed. This often involves coordination between security, IT, and development teams. Automated remediation may be applied where feasible, but many scenarios require manual intervention or policy changes. Clear ownership and workflow documentation are essential to success.

CTEM’s relevance for cloud-native security

CTEM is particularly applicable to cloud-native environments, where rapid development cycles and dynamic infrastructure increase the difficulty of maintaining a current security posture. Cloud resources can be ephemeral, interdependent, and inconsistently tagged, making them difficult to monitor using traditional tools.

By providing real-time visibility and context-aware prioritization, CTEM enables cloud security teams to:

• Continuously monitor new and existing assets
• Detect drift and misconfiguration across cloud services
• Identify exposures in infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and APIs
• Leverage insights from cloud-native security tools and platforms (e.g., CNAPP, DSPM, etc.) to support exposure analysis and prioritization

As a result, CTEM helps align cloud operations with organizational risk management objectives.

Strategic considerations for implementation

Organizations implementing CTEM should consider the following best practices:

• Define clear objectives and success criteria
• Gain executive sponsorship and cross-functional buy-in
• Ensure adequate integration across discovery, threat intelligence, and response systems
• Leverage automation where appropriate, but maintain human oversight
• Track relevant performance indicators over time, including detection and response times, remediation velocity, and changes in overall exposure levels

A well-implemented CTEM program can enhance both security posture and operational efficiency, particularly in environments characterized by complexity and rapid change.

Final thoughts

Continuous Threat Exposure Management represents an evolution in security operations, shifting the focus from periodic assessments to ongoing, risk-aligned remediation. As organizations continue to adopt cloud-native technologies and distributed architectures, CTEM offers a scalable and adaptive framework for managing exposure in real time.

By embedding CTEM practices across people, processes, and technologies, security teams can more effectively prioritize resources, reduce exposure windows, and support resilient operations.

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