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

Pierluigi Paganini
August 07, 2025

CTEM is a continuous strategy that assesses risk from an attacker’s view, helping orgs 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?

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.

This article will explore what CTEM really means, how it tackles the visibility crisis, and why it’s particularly well-suited to the cloud and hybrid ecosystems.

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:

Real-time, contextual insight into active and exploitable risks
Prioritization based on attack paths and potential business impact
Validation through testing, such as simulations and red teaming
Continuous improvement via adaptive feedback loops

The key takeaway here is that CTEM doesn’t just tell you what’s vulnerable, it tells you what’s 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:

Visibility Across Fragmented Infrastructure

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 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.

Understanding Risk Through Identity Context

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.

Exposure Validation, Not Just Detection

Rather than sending teams after every “critical” CVE, CTEM prioritizes validation: Which exposures are truly reachable from the outside? Which ones could actually lead to data exfiltration or privilege escalation?

This is especially useful in cloud environments where CI/CD pipelines, open APIs, and infrastructure as code (IaC) can rapidly introduce new paths that traditional scanning often misses.

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:

Alert fatigue from low-priority findings
Missed attack paths that cross tool or team boundaries
Disjointed telemetry across cloud, on-prem, SaaS, and endpoint systems
Lack of prioritization across security, DevOps, and infrastructure teams

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.

In fact, 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, and up to 82% fewer remediation tickets.

Ultimately, this means stronger security. According to Gartner, by 2026, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be 3x less likely to suffer a breach.

What Does a CTEM Program Look Like in Practice?

A full CTEM lifecycle typically includes five stages:

Scoping – Define the attack surface and business-critical assets
Discovery – Continuously map all assets, exposures, and identities
Prioritization – Rank issues based on attacker behavior and impact
Validation – Test exposure paths via simulations or breach-and-attack techniques
Mobilization – Share actionable insights with relevant teams to drive remediation

Don’t think of CTEM as a tool. Think of it as a strategic, cross-functional practice that aligns IT, DevOps, security, and business stakeholders to ensure comprehensive, intelligent protection.

Organizations just beginning on this journey may scope their programs around a pilot – targeting a specific business unit, technology stack, or attack type – to quickly provide value and iterate.

Use Case: Exposing Hidden Attack Paths

Let’s say an organization uses AWS and Azure across development and production environments, with shared Kubernetes clusters, third-party APIs, and multiple IAM configurations. A misconfigured S3 bucket alone might not be a major cause for concern. But what if:

A developer identity with overly broad permissions can access it
That identity also has access to a misconfigured CI/CD pipeline
The pipeline links to a privileged internal service account

CTEM chains these signals together, showing how an attacker could move laterally, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate sensitive data. It’s not just a misconfigured bucket; it’s an exposed pathway.

This kind of chain reaction isn’t merely hypothetical. In 2024, a breach at Football Australia exposed sensitive player data and plaintext access keys due to misconfigured AWS S3 buckets. One of the buckets was publicly accessible and included hardcoded credentials in the source of the organization’s website. Attackers were able to identify it using public IoT search tools, demonstrating how minor misconfigurations can evolve into serious compound risks.

This is precisely the type of toxic combination of identity and configuration exposures that CTEM is designed to surface before attackers find them.

Why Exposure Management Must Be Continuous

Exposure isn’t static. New vulnerabilities appear daily. Teams push code hourly. Attackers evolve constantly. Cloud environments are especially volatile. Autoscaling, IaC templates, and frequent deployments mean that exposures can appear and disappear within minutes. CTEM provides ongoing visibility and prioritization, rather than snapshots.

Without this continuous view, organizations risk falling into a reactive cycle, always chasing yesterday’s alerts instead of proactively closing tomorrow’s exposure paths.

CTEM: The Next Evolution in Cloud Security

CTEM isn’t just another buzzword. It’s the next – and necessary – evolution in how we think about cybersecurity. There’s a reason that 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. It unifies visibility, aligns remediation with real-world risk, and helps teams focus on what actually matters.

About the author: Josh Breaker-Rolfe

Josh is a Content writer at Bora. He graduated with a degree in Journalism in 2021 and has a background in cybersecurity PR. He’s written on a wide range of topics, from AI to Zero Trust, and is particularly interested in the impacts of cybersecurity on the wider economy.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM))

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