Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a new and expansive view of enterprise security. The legacy vulnerability management solutions and approach is still valid, just not comprehensive enough to truly protect an enterprise. With enterprises under attack from internal and external threat actors, every advantage the organization can gain to secure every avenue the threat actor might act upon could mean the difference between being breached and subverting the attack.

What CTEM includes

CTEM attempts to include many aspects of security for the organization. The expansion to CTEM over legacy vulnerability management alone is due to the fact that attackers do not just focus on exploiting vulnerabilities, but rather look at many security aspects, across all assets.

Therefore CTEM includes vulnerability management, but also includes the following issues:

Misconfigurations

Patching

Cloud Security

Software Security

Identity Security

The ideal CTEM solution would also be asset-centric. What this refers to is two aspects of the asset:

With a unified CTEM solution focusing on assets as the foundation, a comprehensive master list of issues can be developed so that the organization knows exactly which issues on which assets need to be addressed first and immediately.

What is the Trajectory of CTEM?

CTEM is so powerful, it is becoming the norm for enterprises that are looking for a centralized view of their assets and issues for each asset. Gartner is driving CTEM for the community and organizations, as they reported in their Implement a CTEM Program in July 2022:

By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a continuous exposure management programme will be three times less likely to suffer from a breach.

Many organizations are dismayed with the overall security of their assets and the fact many are still being breached, even though they have vulnerability management and other security products they rely on. The truth of the matter is that disparate security solutions fail to give a unified and overall prioritization view of what issues need to be remediated, so often the most important security issues are not being addressed.

Main Drawbacks for Companies Not Implementing CTEM

Many organizations are attempting to resolve their security issues using legacy vulnerability management solutions, while others are trying to fill the gaps left behind with legacy vulnerability management solutions. Both angles have significant drawbacks and are leaving organizations worse off than if they were to implement a true exposure management solution. Some of the drawbacks that organizations are dealing with by not moving to a true exposure management solution include the following.

Too Many Point Solutions

Organizations that attempt to fill gaps to complete their exposure management goals will find that adding solutions to meet their goals might make the overall security of their enterprise worse. As security teams are already overwhelmed with too many alerts and logs, adding security solutions just adds bigger burdens that they don’t have time to attend to.

No Integration Between Solutions

Along the same lines as too many security solutions that burden the security team, disparate security solutions from different vendors don’t integrate to give the organization the overall issue priority view that is necessary to know what is most important.

No Unification Or Correlation Of Security Issues

A true exposure management platform is able to compare differing issues to develop a single view of what needs to be addressed now. Unfortunately when different vendors security platforms are introduced into an organization, there is no unity or correlations between them, nor the issues each represent.

No Consideration Of Asset Prioritization

Issue prioritization is key, but so is asset prioritization. Everyone agrees that a domain controller should get more attention compared to a workstation, which is at the heart of asset prioritization. Most security solutions, even vulnerability management solutions, omit this level of prioritization, causing security teams to spend time on assets that don’t have the same impact as those that need attention immediately.

Limited Platform Support

As organizations moved to a remote work force, additional platforms were needed to provide the same access and capabilities. These additional platforms are often cloud based and most security solutions are not updated to help secure these platforms.

No Compliance Framework Reporting

Compliance is essential and a requirement for many organizations. Organizations that deal with credit cards, health records, military contracts, etc. must meet certain compliance regulations. In so many cases the analysis of meeting the compliance regulations is a manual process, forcing a high cost and often errant results.

Why is CTEM so Essential to Modern Businesses?

As you can see, CTEM is not easy to achieve, especially when organizations want to latch on to the legacy security solutions that have let them down for so many years. Moving to an updated CTEM solution is essential for the modern enterprise to combat current and proven attacks and breaches.

Attackers use so many tactics that single-point security solutions become a hindrance, instead of a path to good security practices. Attackers have proven that any and all inroads to the organizations will be enumerated and exploited. CTEM is the solution that gives the organization’s security team the full view of what security issues need to be addressed, to deny these tactics.

How CTEM Transforms an Organization's IT Security?

Once an organization realizes that they have too many gaps with their current security stack of solutions, decisions need to be made. As we spelled out above, tacking on more security tools can backfire, leaving issues wide open for attackers.

By leveraging an asset-centric issue approach, where both assets and each issue are normalized to develop a unified prioritization view, the overall organization security posture will improve. This reduction in security risk addresses the highest priority issues, on the highest priority assets, which is what will have the biggest impact on the security of the organization.

No longer will security teams need to use spreadsheets and manual data manipulation to find out what issues need immediate attention. The CTEM approach therefore not only reduces security risk but will make securing assets and the most important issues cost less.

What is the Impact of Investing in CTEM?

Most organizations choose to replace the different security point solutions with a centralized CTEM solution. There are many benefits to this approach, which include the following.

Reduction In Security Tools

Every security employee will agree that fewer tools make them more efficient, compared to many tools. Who wants to manage different GUIs, tools, licenses, and solutions, when a single security solution can produce a more efficient result.

Integration Is Built-In

When a unified CTEM solution is implemented, there is no need for integration. The integration is not needed, as the single solution was built to normalize the data and present the most important security issues in a prioritized view, across all security issues.

Asset-Centric Prioritization

Although a simple concept, it is one that is omitted from so many security solutions. Ensuring that the most valuable assets are giving a priority could have prevented recent breaches. It is key to having the most important assets giving a higher priority, for the overall risk reduction of the enterprise.

Expansive Platform Support

The enterprise network has expanded, that is a fact. Expansion into remote tools, virtualization solutions, cloud solutions, and more has caused security teams to attempt to learn how to secure each platform. A solid CTEM solution will take that burden off of the security team, by providing them with the security issues that need to be solved, instead of forcing them to manually calculate what to fix.

Nanjgel Has The Ideal Unified CTEM Solution

There are not many CTEM tools that can claim they solve what a true CTEM needs to solve. We have one of the only CTEM solutions that solves the enterprise security needs.

Ours is asset-centric, prioritizing assets so the most important assets are addressed first.

Nanjgel incorporates the core security issues that every enterprise needs to secure so that the most important security issues can be fixed immediately.

The Platform does not need to integrate across security issues, as it was built to normalize data automatically.

No other CTEM security solution provides the automatic asset discovery and prioritization; automatic security issue gathering, analysis, and prioritization; health reporting for the organization and assets; compliance reporting with a single click; and issue remediation guidance that we provide.

Conclusion

Legacy vulnerability management is not enough security for even an SMB. Attackers use too many tactics to enter and exploit assets in an organization. Therefore, CTEM was invented and is now the de-facto security approach for every sized organization.

CTEM provides the security analysis required to know “what security issues do I need to fix now, to deny a breach”? Without a CTEM solution in place, organizations will continue to be breached and struggle with the basic security hygiene of their assets and issues.

Nanjgel’s CTEM replaces legacy vulnerability management solutions, as well as incorporates patching, misconfigurations, software security, cloud security, and even identity security. Secure Your Digital World with Nanjgel

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