June 16, 2026
CTEM: A New Approach to Risk and Vulnerability Management
Continuous threat exposure management helps organizations identify, validate and remediate the exposures that matter most.
KEY BUSINESS AND
SECURITY BENEFITS OF CTEM
HOW TO BUILD
A CTEM PROGRAM
The volume of cyberthreats is exploding, and new AI models are capable of discovering vulnerabilities at machine scale and machine speed. With these new models surfacing thousands of previously unknown weaknesses across software that organizations rely on every day, traditional security practices that are largely signature-based simply cannot keep up.
While many cybersecurity programs rely on siloed tools and reactive response, the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) framework shifts practices toward proactive risk management by identifying and prioritizing the threats most likely to affect the business. A CTEM cycle comprises five stages: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization. Most security professionals are aware of CTEM, but only a small minority of organizations have implemented the framework.
An effective CTEM program can improve risk prioritization, enhance visibility, increase operational efficiency and strengthen executive decision-making. The framework may also help organizations derive more value from current cybersecurity investments by using existing capabilities to create a risk-informed action plan. A trusted partner such as CDW can help organizations put CTEM concepts into practice through rigorous assessments, new measurement capabilities and ongoing threat prioritization.
The volume of cyberthreats is exploding, and new AI models are capable of discovering vulnerabilities at machine scale and machine speed. With these new models surfacing thousands of previously unknown weaknesses across software that organizations rely on every day, traditional security practices that are largely signature-based simply cannot keep up.
While many cybersecurity programs rely on siloed tools and reactive response, the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) framework shifts practices toward proactive risk management by identifying and prioritizing the threats most likely to affect the business. A CTEM cycle comprises five stages: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization. Most security professionals are aware of CTEM, but only a small minority of organizations have implemented the framework.
An effective CTEM program can improve risk prioritization, enhance visibility, increase operational efficiency and strengthen executive decision-making. The framework may also help organizations derive more value from current cybersecurity investments by using existing capabilities to create a risk-informed action plan. A trusted partner such as CDW can help organizations put CTEM concepts into practice through rigorous assessments, new measurement capabilities and ongoing threat prioritization.
The cybersecurity landscape is changing too quickly for many organizations to keep up.
Attack surfaces continue to grow and change due to factors such as hybrid work and the ongoing movement of IT resources in and out of public cloud environments. Cyberattacks are growing in both volume and sophistication, with Fortinet recording nearly 122 billion exploitation attempts in 2025 (a 26% increase from the year before). And AI is creating new types of risk and vulnerabilities that weren’t even on organizations’ radar until recently, while also potentially giving hackers the ability to uncover new zero-day threats and accelerate the creation of exploit packages.
In April 2026, Anthropic announced that it was holding its Mythos model back from public release due to what the company characterized as extreme levels of new cybersecurity risk. The model, the company said, is capable of discovering new vulnerabilities in major operating systems, browsers and critical libraries. In internal tests, Mythos dramatically outperformed earlier models on security benchmarks and exploit tasks and even engaged in what Anthropic called “strategic manipulation,” breaking out of sandboxes and hiding its tracks in version control.
Although most sizable organizations already have robust cyberdefenses, those were largely not designed to protect such a variable attack surface or tackle such advanced threats. Traditional security models are largely built on periodic assessments, siloed tools and reactive incident response — a combination that is no longer sufficient to keep pace with modern threats. Despite their investments, many organizations struggle with limited visibility across the attack surface, tool sprawl, delayed remediation and difficulty aligning security efforts with business risk. These issues lead to inefficiencies where teams spend much of their time mitigating relatively low-risk vulnerabilities while critical exposures remain unaddressed.
Continuous threat exposure management has emerged in response to these gaps. Rather than relying on point-in-time assessments, CTEM introduces a continuous, structured approach to identifying, validating, prioritizing and remediating exposures, shifting security from reactive defense to proactive risk management. This shift is critical because it addresses how attackers operate in the real world: continuously, not periodically.
More important, CTEM also focuses on the real-world exploitability and business impact of vulnerabilities. These factors are largely overlooked by traditional cybersecurity tools, meaning that teams end up chasing down an endless stream of alerts instead of focusing on the ones that have the potential to devastate the business.
By enabling ongoing visibility and adaptive response, CTEM ensures that organizations can keep up with evolving attacks and protect themselves against the most dangerous threats.
70%
The percentage reduction from 2021 to 2025 in breakout time — the time needed for a cyberattacker to move laterally after an initial compromise
Source: CrowdStrike, 2026 Global Threat Report, February 2026
The cybersecurity landscape is changing too quickly for many organizations to keep up.
Attack surfaces continue to grow and change due to factors such as hybrid work and the ongoing movement of IT resources in and out of public cloud environments. Cyberattacks are growing in both volume and sophistication, with Fortinet recording nearly 122 billion exploitation attempts in 2025 (a 26% increase from the year before). And AI is creating new types of risk and vulnerabilities that weren’t even on organizations’ radar until recently, while also potentially giving hackers the ability to uncover new zero-day threats and accelerate the creation of exploit packages.
In April 2026, Anthropic announced that it was holding its Mythos model back from public release due to what the company characterized as extreme levels of new cybersecurity risk. The model, the company said, is capable of discovering new vulnerabilities in major operating systems, browsers and critical libraries. In internal tests, Mythos dramatically outperformed earlier models on security benchmarks and exploit tasks and even engaged in what Anthropic called “strategic manipulation,” breaking out of sandboxes and hiding its tracks in version control.
Although most sizable organizations already have robust cyberdefenses, those were largely not designed to protect such a variable attack surface or tackle such advanced threats. Traditional security models are largely built on periodic assessments, siloed tools and reactive incident response — a combination that is no longer sufficient to keep pace with modern threats. Despite their investments, many organizations struggle with limited visibility across the attack surface, tool sprawl, delayed remediation and difficulty aligning security efforts with business risk. These issues lead to inefficiencies where teams spend much of their time mitigating relatively low-risk vulnerabilities while critical exposures remain unaddressed.
Continuous threat exposure management has emerged in response to these gaps. Rather than relying on point-in-time assessments, CTEM introduces a continuous, structured approach to identifying, validating, prioritizing and remediating exposures, shifting security from reactive defense to proactive risk management. This shift is critical because it addresses how attackers operate in the real world: continuously, not periodically.
More important, CTEM also focuses on the real-world exploitability and business impact of vulnerabilities. These factors are largely overlooked by traditional cybersecurity tools, meaning that teams end up chasing down an endless stream of alerts instead of focusing on the ones that have the potential to devastate the business.
By enabling ongoing visibility and adaptive response, CTEM ensures that organizations can keep up with evolving attacks and protect themselves against the most dangerous threats.
CTEM By the Numbers
89%
The percentage increase in AI-enabled attacks from 2024 to 2025
Source: CrowdStrike, 2026 Global Threat Report, February 2026
42%
The percentage increase from 2024 to 2025 in zero-day vulnerabilities exploited prior to public disclosure
Source: CrowdStrike, 2026 Global Threat Report, February 2026
$4.4M
The average cost of a data breach in 2025
Source: IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, July 2025
CTEM By the Numbers
89%
The percentage increase in AI-enabled attacks from 2024 to 2025
Source: CrowdStrike, 2026 Global Threat Report, February 2026
42%
The percentage increase from 2024 to 2025 in zero-day vulnerabilities exploited prior to public disclosure
Source: CrowdStrike, 2026 Global Threat Report, February 2026
$4.4M
The average cost of a data breach in 2025
Source: IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, July 2025
- CTEM: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS
- KEY BUSINESS AND SECURITY BENEFITS OF CTEM
- HOW TO BUILD A CTEM PROGRAM
Continuous threat exposure management is a strategic cybersecurity framework designed to help organizations continuously assess and reduce their exposure to threats. Introduced by Gartner, CTEM integrates people, processes and technologies into a cohesive, iterative program focused on measurable risk reduction.
Traditional security practices tend to prioritize vulnerabilities based on the potential impact to the affected system regardless of business context or environmental variables. CTEM shifts organizations toward an approach that takes into consideration the business value of a system and what compensating controls may be in place. CTEM is a continuous cycle, not a one-time security initiative. Gartner breaks down the CTEM cycle into five stages:
SCOPING CRITICAL ASSETS: During this stage, security teams identify the business services, applications, cloud environments and other assets that expose the organization to meaningful risk if compromised. This is sometimes described as setting the “operational boundary” for exposure discovery. Critically, this stage forces teams to begin by thinking in terms of business value. Because CTEM is a continuous process, teams might opt not to implement CTEM across the entire organization all at once. Instead, they can choose an initial scope for a pilot and then expand CTEM practices to other assets over time. They also may identify the elements of the minimum viable company, which represent the most critical assets needed to operate the business. Establishing the MVC helps the organization prioritize its security efforts based on which assets are needed for the business to survive in the event of a disruption.
DISCOVERING EXPOSURES: Once organizations define their scope, they must continuously identify the exposures that exist within the environment. This stage goes beyond traditional vulnerability scanning to build a holistic, real-time view of relevant assets, identities, configurations, applications, cloud resources and external-facing systems. It is important to note that not all security gaps stem from inherent system vulnerabilities. For example, according to some estimates, more than half of cloud breaches are tied to configuration issues. Other potential sources of security gaps include shadow IT, unmanaged assets and excessive privilege.
PRIORITIZING RISKS: After identifying exposures, teams must determine which risks require immediate action. This step illustrates how CTEM differs from traditional vulnerability management, which may prioritize vulnerabilities based on criteria such as exploit availability and compliance needs. By contrast, CTEM emphasizes context, prioritizing exposures based on their likelihood for exploitation and potential business impact. The number of known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) has risen into the tens of thousands, with the list growing substantially each year. Addressing 100% percent of these vulnerabilities is impractical, so teams must focus on closing the gaps that create real risk rather than chasing volume-based metrics.
VALIDATING EXPLOITABILITY: Next, organizations must determine whether the most serious exposures can actually be exploited in their environment. This is a critical distinction. A vulnerability might look severe on paper, but existing controls, network segmentation or other measures may already prevent attackers from exploiting it. Similarly, a lower-priority issue may become urgent if validation shows that it creates a viable path to a critical asset. Organizations can use breach and attack simulation, penetration testing and other controlled simulations to validate the exploitability of exposures and their impact on business systems.
MOBILIZING REMEDIATION EFFORTS: Finally, organizations must coordinate action across the teams responsible for reducing risk to assign ownership, set timelines and track remediation. In some cases, the fix may be a patch or configuration change. In others, it may involve disabling exposed credentials or tightening access controls. Because this work often spans security, IT operations and business teams, mobilization must be well organized, with set escalation paths and accountability. The closed-loop nature of the CTEM cycle ensures that security programs evolve alongside the organization’s environment and threat landscape.
Click Below To Continue Reading
As business leaders begin familiarizing themselves with the concept of CTEM, they should be alert to these five signals, which may indicate that the framework is needed inside their organization.
Alert Fatigue: When security teams are overwhelmed by alerts, they often cannot tell which exposures are actually exploitable or business critical. A CTEM framework helps validate exposures and correlate them with threat intelligence and business risk.
Tool Sprawl: Many organizations run multiple, sometimes overlapping cybersecurity solutions. CTEM practices help coordinate these tools, aggregating outputs and turning findings into prioritized remediation plans.
Lack of Visibility: Security teams can’t fight what they can’t see. CTEM helps close gaps related to asset inventory, cloud visibility and shadow IT, creating a unified view of the attack surface.
Slow Remediation: Cyberattackers move fast once they infiltrate enterprise networks and business tools. CTEM emphasizes compliance with service-level agreements, remediation and cross-team mobilization to reduce time-to-action.
Misaligned Priorities: Security teams can stay busy patching numerous vulnerabilities without ever closing the most business-critical security gaps. CTEM shifts the focus from activity to risk reduction.
CTEM delivers significant advantages by aligning cybersecurity efforts with business objectives and focusing on outcomes rather than activity. In addition to providing risk prioritization, an effective CTEM program will enhance visibility, improve operational efficiency, lead to better decision-making and help organizations get more value from their existing cybersecurity investments.
RISK PRIORITIZATION: A CTEM framework ensures that organizations evaluate exposures based on exploitability and business impact, reducing wasted effort by allowing security teams to focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most. Rather than generating an exhaustive list of vulnerabilities, CTEM aims to identify those that need immediate action. For example, CDW worked with one large financial institution that had more than 47,000 open vulnerability findings across cloud and on-premises environments. By applying CTEM principles, the organization narrowed that backlog to 312 validated high-priority exposures, while also identifying and eliminating 14 critical-asset attack paths to trading systems.
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY: By reducing alert fatigue and consolidating insights from multiple tools, security teams can streamline workflows and focus on high-value activities. This aligns with industry observations about how organizations often struggle with tool overload and unclear prioritization — challenges the CTEM framework is specifically designed to address. The financial institution mentioned above reduced manual triage time by 75% and cut red-team engagement costs by 40%. Also, documentation audit time fell by 60%, and mean time to detect threats on the network dropped from 26 hours to less than two hours after coverage gaps were discovered and closed.
ENHANCED VISIBILITY: CTEM provides a unified view across an organization’s entire attack surface, including cloud, on-premises and identity environments — a particularly important approach given that identity compromise is involved in the vast majority of all incidents that are successful in data breaches or operational impact. This eliminates blind spots and enables organizations to understand their true risk posture in real time. Here again, prioritization is key. True visibility occurs when security teams are able to make sense of the data in front of them to determine what is most important, not when they are handed an asset inventory and vulnerability backlog with no additional context. One CDW customer, a healthcare organization, used CTEM practices to identify 3,100 previously undocumented medical devices. Upon further investigation, the health system discovered that 89% of clinical assets lacked ownership attribution.
IMPROVED DECISION-MAKING: Because CTEM practices bring more context to security-related data, they also enable better decision-making. Rather than trying to decipher raw vulnerability numbers, leaders can analyze business risks and make decisions that will have a positive impact on their organization’s operations, revenue and reputation. In the financial services example, CTEM enabled executive reporting that translated technical exposure into business impact. The organization used metrics such as validated attack paths, executive risk scoring and financial risk quantification, ultimately reducing estimated annual breach loss from $34 million to $11 million. For the healthcare organization, estimated breach exposure fell from $67 million to $19 million in one year.
NEW VALUE FROM EXISTING INVESTMENTS: A CTEM pilot doesn’t necessarily require an organization to purchase new cybersecurity tools or monitoring platforms. Often, teams already have many of the core capabilities they need to get started, including vulnerability scanners, endpoint tools, security information and event management (SIEM) platforms and cloud security solutions. The problem is typically not that organizations lack security tools, but rather that these investments often operate in silos, producing more data than teams can realistically act on. CTEM helps organizations derive additional value from these investments by organizing outputs in a more coherent risk management program, using data aggregation, deduplication and validation to turn findings into a prioritized plan of action.
Organizations can put CTEM into practice by starting with a pilot and then expanding in phases until they have a risk-informed, continuously validated security program. CDW’s security experts can help guide teams through the entire process.
CONDUCT A MATURITY ASSESSMENT: CDW has identified 34 key risk indicators (KRIs), grouped into seven categories: time-based metrics; exposure management; coverage and visibility; identity and access; validation and testing; threat intelligence; and business alignment. Together, these KRIs provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s overall risk environment, from basic detection metrics to board-level business risks. During a CTEM maturity assessment, teams evaluate current KRI coverage across all seven categories and establish baseline values for active KRIs. This helps reveal where existing tools are producing useful data, where information remains siloed and where teams lack the context needed to connect technical findings to business risk. By working with an unbiased third-party partner that possesses deep security expertise, organizations can ensure a thorough and objective assessment.
ACTIVATE FOUNDATIONAL KRIs: At this point, organizations will begin tracking any CTEM metrics that they currently lack. This includes establishing configuration management database (CMDB) accuracy and attack surface coverage baselines. Also, if they have not already done so, teams will activate tracking for metrics such as mean time to detect, mean time to remediate and open exposure backlogs in their IT service management platform. These metrics help teams answer basic but essential questions: Do we know what assets we have? Are they covered by security tools? Are exposures being assigned and remediated within defined time frames? At this stage, teams also deploy or integrate asset discovery across their cloud and on-premises environments and define service-level agreement thresholds for critical exposures.
PRIORITIZE THREATS BASED ON RISK: As a CTEM program matures, the focus shifts from counting vulnerabilities to identifying the exposures that are most likely to affect critical assets and business operations. This requires integrating threat intelligence, tracking coverage of known exploited vulnerabilities and enabling attack path analysis for critical asset mapping. Teams also validate the exploitability of critical vulnerabilities through breach and attack simulations or penetration testing. Ultimately, this stage culminates in the creation of risk-based remediation queues that go beyond standard security frameworks — such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) — by taking business context into account. This helps security teams focus their time and resources on the exposures that are not only most likely to be exploited but also most likely to disrupt the business.
LAUNCH EXECUTIVE REPORTING: After vulnerabilities are cataloged and prioritized, teams must translate their progress into language that business leaders can understand and act on, with quarterly reviews to keep programs on track. An Executive Risk Score dashboard can show risk trends and potential business impacts. Further, ongoing financial risk quantification aligned with the FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) framework can illustrate the total economic impact of improvements related to security gaps. These reports help executives see where risk exists and how security investments are measurably improving the organization’s risk posture and resilience over time. By following this structured approach, organizations can build a sustainable CTEM program that evolves with their environment, helping them stay ahead of threats while maintaining a resilient security posture.
- CTEM: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS
- KEY BUSINESS AND SECURITY BENEFITS OF CTEM
- HOW TO BUILD A CTEM PROGRAM
Continuous threat exposure management is a strategic cybersecurity framework designed to help organizations continuously assess and reduce their exposure to threats. Introduced by Gartner, CTEM integrates people, processes and technologies into a cohesive, iterative program focused on measurable risk reduction.
Traditional security practices tend to prioritize vulnerabilities based on the potential impact to the affected system regardless of business context or environmental variables. CTEM shifts organizations toward an approach that takes into consideration the business value of a system and what compensating controls may be in place. CTEM is a continuous cycle, not a one-time security initiative. Gartner breaks down the CTEM cycle into five stages:
SCOPING CRITICAL ASSETS: During this stage, security teams identify the business services, applications, cloud environments and other assets that expose the organization to meaningful risk if compromised. This is sometimes described as setting the “operational boundary” for exposure discovery. Critically, this stage forces teams to begin by thinking in terms of business value. Because CTEM is a continuous process, teams might opt not to implement CTEM across the entire organization all at once. Instead, they can choose an initial scope for a pilot and then expand CTEM practices to other assets over time. They also may identify the elements of the minimum viable company, which represent the most critical assets needed to operate the business. Establishing the MVC helps the organization prioritize its security efforts based on which assets are needed for the business to survive in the event of a disruption.
DISCOVERING EXPOSURES: Once organizations define their scope, they must continuously identify the exposures that exist within the environment. This stage goes beyond traditional vulnerability scanning to build a holistic, real-time view of relevant assets, identities, configurations, applications, cloud resources and external-facing systems. It is important to note that not all security gaps stem from inherent system vulnerabilities. For example, according to some estimates, more than half of cloud breaches are tied to configuration issues. Other potential sources of security gaps include shadow IT, unmanaged assets and excessive privilege.
PRIORITIZING RISKS: After identifying exposures, teams must determine which risks require immediate action. This step illustrates how CTEM differs from traditional vulnerability management, which may prioritize vulnerabilities based on criteria such as exploit availability and compliance needs. By contrast, CTEM emphasizes context, prioritizing exposures based on their likelihood for exploitation and potential business impact. The number of known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) has risen into the tens of thousands, with the list growing substantially each year. Addressing 100% percent of these vulnerabilities is impractical, so teams must focus on closing the gaps that create real risk rather than chasing volume-based metrics.
VALIDATING EXPLOITABILITY: Next, organizations must determine whether the most serious exposures can actually be exploited in their environment. This is a critical distinction. A vulnerability might look severe on paper, but existing controls, network segmentation or other measures may already prevent attackers from exploiting it. Similarly, a lower-priority issue may become urgent if validation shows that it creates a viable path to a critical asset. Organizations can use breach and attack simulation, penetration testing and other controlled simulations to validate the exploitability of exposures and their impact on business systems.
MOBILIZING REMEDIATION EFFORTS: Finally, organizations must coordinate action across the teams responsible for reducing risk to assign ownership, set timelines and track remediation. In some cases, the fix may be a patch or configuration change. In others, it may involve disabling exposed credentials or tightening access controls. Because this work often spans security, IT operations and business teams, mobilization must be well organized, with set escalation paths and accountability. The closed-loop nature of the CTEM cycle ensures that security programs evolve alongside the organization’s environment and threat landscape.
Click Below To Continue Reading
As business leaders begin familiarizing themselves with the concept of CTEM, they should be alert to these five signals, which may indicate that the framework is needed inside their organization.
Alert Fatigue: When security teams are overwhelmed by alerts, they often cannot tell which exposures are actually exploitable or business critical. A CTEM framework helps validate exposures and correlate them with threat intelligence and business risk.
Tool Sprawl: Many organizations run multiple, sometimes overlapping cybersecurity solutions. CTEM practices help coordinate these tools, aggregating outputs and turning findings into prioritized remediation plans.
Lack of Visibility: Security teams can’t fight what they can’t see. CTEM helps close gaps related to asset inventory, cloud visibility and shadow IT, creating a unified view of the attack surface.
Slow Remediation: Cyberattackers move fast once they infiltrate enterprise networks and business tools. CTEM emphasizes compliance with service-level agreements, remediation and cross-team mobilization to reduce time-to-action.
Misaligned Priorities: Security teams can stay busy patching numerous vulnerabilities without ever closing the most business-critical security gaps. CTEM shifts the focus from activity to risk reduction.
CTEM delivers significant advantages by aligning cybersecurity efforts with business objectives and focusing on outcomes rather than activity. In addition to providing risk prioritization, an effective CTEM program will enhance visibility, improve operational efficiency, lead to better decision-making and help organizations get more value from their existing cybersecurity investments.
RISK PRIORITIZATION: A CTEM framework ensures that organizations evaluate exposures based on exploitability and business impact, reducing wasted effort by allowing security teams to focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most. Rather than generating an exhaustive list of vulnerabilities, CTEM aims to identify those that need immediate action. For example, CDW worked with one large financial institution that had more than 47,000 open vulnerability findings across cloud and on-premises environments. By applying CTEM principles, the organization narrowed that backlog to 312 validated high-priority exposures, while also identifying and eliminating 14 critical-asset attack paths to trading systems.
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY: By reducing alert fatigue and consolidating insights from multiple tools, security teams can streamline workflows and focus on high-value activities. This aligns with industry observations about how organizations often struggle with tool overload and unclear prioritization — challenges the CTEM framework is specifically designed to address. The financial institution mentioned above reduced manual triage time by 75% and cut red-team engagement costs by 40%. Also, documentation audit time fell by 60%, and mean time to detect threats on the network dropped from 26 hours to less than two hours after coverage gaps were discovered and closed.
ENHANCED VISIBILITY: CTEM provides a unified view across an organization’s entire attack surface, including cloud, on-premises and identity environments — a particularly important approach given that identity compromise is involved in the vast majority of all incidents that are successful in data breaches or operational impact. This eliminates blind spots and enables organizations to understand their true risk posture in real time. Here again, prioritization is key. True visibility occurs when security teams are able to make sense of the data in front of them to determine what is most important, not when they are handed an asset inventory and vulnerability backlog with no additional context. One CDW customer, a healthcare organization, used CTEM practices to identify 3,100 previously undocumented medical devices. Upon further investigation, the health system discovered that 89% of clinical assets lacked ownership attribution.
IMPROVED DECISION-MAKING: Because CTEM practices bring more context to security-related data, they also enable better decision-making. Rather than trying to decipher raw vulnerability numbers, leaders can analyze business risks and make decisions that will have a positive impact on their organization’s operations, revenue and reputation. In the financial services example, CTEM enabled executive reporting that translated technical exposure into business impact. The organization used metrics such as validated attack paths, executive risk scoring and financial risk quantification, ultimately reducing estimated annual breach loss from $34 million to $11 million. For the healthcare organization, estimated breach exposure fell from $67 million to $19 million in one year.
NEW VALUE FROM EXISTING INVESTMENTS: A CTEM pilot doesn’t necessarily require an organization to purchase new cybersecurity tools or monitoring platforms. Often, teams already have many of the core capabilities they need to get started, including vulnerability scanners, endpoint tools, security information and event management (SIEM) platforms and cloud security solutions. The problem is typically not that organizations lack security tools, but rather that these investments often operate in silos, producing more data than teams can realistically act on. CTEM helps organizations derive additional value from these investments by organizing outputs in a more coherent risk management program, using data aggregation, deduplication and validation to turn findings into a prioritized plan of action.
Organizations can put CTEM into practice by starting with a pilot and then expanding in phases until they have a risk-informed, continuously validated security program. CDW’s security experts can help guide teams through the entire process.
CONDUCT A MATURITY ASSESSMENT: CDW has identified 34 key risk indicators (KRIs), grouped into seven categories: time-based metrics; exposure management; coverage and visibility; identity and access; validation and testing; threat intelligence; and business alignment. Together, these KRIs provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s overall risk environment, from basic detection metrics to board-level business risks. During a CTEM maturity assessment, teams evaluate current KRI coverage across all seven categories and establish baseline values for active KRIs. This helps reveal where existing tools are producing useful data, where information remains siloed and where teams lack the context needed to connect technical findings to business risk. By working with an unbiased third-party partner that possesses deep security expertise, organizations can ensure a thorough and objective assessment.
ACTIVATE FOUNDATIONAL KRIs: At this point, organizations will begin tracking any CTEM metrics that they currently lack. This includes establishing configuration management database (CMDB) accuracy and attack surface coverage baselines. Also, if they have not already done so, teams will activate tracking for metrics such as mean time to detect, mean time to remediate and open exposure backlogs in their IT service management platform. These metrics help teams answer basic but essential questions: Do we know what assets we have? Are they covered by security tools? Are exposures being assigned and remediated within defined time frames? At this stage, teams also deploy or integrate asset discovery across their cloud and on-premises environments and define service-level agreement thresholds for critical exposures.
PRIORITIZE THREATS BASED ON RISK: As a CTEM program matures, the focus shifts from counting vulnerabilities to identifying the exposures that are most likely to affect critical assets and business operations. This requires integrating threat intelligence, tracking coverage of known exploited vulnerabilities and enabling attack path analysis for critical asset mapping. Teams also validate the exploitability of critical vulnerabilities through breach and attack simulations or penetration testing. Ultimately, this stage culminates in the creation of risk-based remediation queues that go beyond standard security frameworks — such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) — by taking business context into account. This helps security teams focus their time and resources on the exposures that are not only most likely to be exploited but also most likely to disrupt the business.
LAUNCH EXECUTIVE REPORTING: After vulnerabilities are cataloged and prioritized, teams must translate their progress into language that business leaders can understand and act on, with quarterly reviews to keep programs on track. An Executive Risk Score dashboard can show risk trends and potential business impacts. Further, ongoing financial risk quantification aligned with the FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) framework can illustrate the total economic impact of improvements related to security gaps. These reports help executives see where risk exists and how security investments are measurably improving the organization’s risk posture and resilience over time. By following this structured approach, organizations can build a sustainable CTEM program that evolves with their environment, helping them stay ahead of threats while maintaining a resilient security posture.
Buck Bell
CDW Expert
Charles Cartwright
Executive Technology Strategist