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08 Apr Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is one of the best cybersecurity management approaches that aims to identify and mitigate risks posed by cyber threats as quickly as possible. This approach will ensure that your organisation remains protected and is always vigilant of new threats and attacks that it could face.
In this article, we’ll go over the ins and outs of Continuous Threat Exposure Management, as well as how you can get started with implementing it today.
What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a holistic approach to your organisation’s cybersecurity that aims to detect, identify, assess, and mitigate any threats and risks posed by cyber threats. It’s an all-encompassing solution to the problem of cybersecurity and is essentially a multi-tool for dealing with cyber threats.
However, CTEM doesn’t exist just for dealing with threats as they come along. The idea of CTEM instead exists to emphasise the idea of mitigation and prevention, to ensure that you’re protected and shielded against any threats that may come your way. This means patching up any gaps and vulnerabilities inside your organisation’s cyber infrastructure.
CTEM Is also designed to be ever-evolving to meet the needs of your organisation and the modern age. This is because it’s a proactive approach — it evolves to ensure that your needs are met at the time and that you can roadmap to address the gaps in your organisation — letting you stay prepared at all times.
This is essential in the modern world — threats are ever-evolving and you need to ensure that your organisation is prepared for them. Instead of using a system that is unable to change to meet new threats, CTEM is adaptable and lets you stay prepared for anything.
Key Components of CTEM
Real-time Threat Intelligence
The first step of CTEM is real-time threat intelligence. This is more than just threat detection, as it takes a more proactive approach to the idea of seeking threats and stamping them out.
A CTEM program will not only detect threats but also use data to create actionable insights to help you understand and face whatever threats could be around the corner. This means you can take them head-on without any nasty surprises.
These insights will also tell you how to patch up your organisation, making your whole infrastructure more solid and protected all around. With this, you can also align your cybersecurity strategy with your business objectives, meaning your business will become even more prosperous in the future.
Automated Risk Assessment
Having to manually assess risks can be time-consuming and incredibly subjective, and can even lead to a mismatch between risk level and measures taken — which is not good for your organisation whatsoever.
A CTEM program will be able to proactively assess and manage threats, meaning that you can easily address vulnerabilities and threats without having to actively do so. This is possible due to CTEM’s continuous nature — a CTEM program will continuously scan for threats and monitor your infrastructure, letting you take proactive measures against cyber threats as they come, without any gaps in protection.
Prioritisation of Threats
The final component of CTEM is the prioritisation of threats — a CTEM program can identify threats and prioritise them, making sure to deal with objectively worse threats before other, lesser threats. This process will help you ensure that you’re taking on the right threats, instead of having to guess yourself and possibly missing a massive threat right under your nose.
CTEM prioritises threats by analysing their potential impact and likelihood of occurrence, evaluating the severity and damage of that threat and using it to generate information — letting organisations dedicate their resources to highly important threats.
This all makes the whole process far more efficient and easy for organisations, as a CTEM program will use organisational data for its analysis — adapting itself to your needs.
Implementing CTEM
Implementing CTEM is a multi-step process, with five stages that are all important to ensure you get the most out of your CTEM platform.
The five stages are as follows —
- Scoping: Scoping is the process of identifying the initial scope of an attack surface, letting you work out which parts of your infrastructure will be a part of the CTEM program.
- Discovery: Discovery is the process of exploring your organisation’s infrastructure and assets to figure out what needs to be reinforced and what security gaps there are.
- Prioritisation: Prioritisation will let you prioritise whatever was found in the discovery process, and which assets need to be reinforced and gaps need to be filled more urgently. These will be taken into account and addressed sooner than less sensitive aspects of your organisation.
- Validation: Validation is an essential part of the process, as it involves testing your CTEM system to ensure everything is working correctly — this is done through a controlled simulation.
- Mobilisation: The last step is the mobilisation phase, where you’ll implement CTEM into your organisation — rolling it out as has been planned previously during the implementation process.
Ready to Get Started?
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is an essential technology for any modern business — it lets organisations ensure that they’re protected in real-time against threats and attackers and greatly mitigates the chance of a cyber incident.
With lots of different innovations and technologies being implemented into the arsenal of attackers, the adaptability of CTEM cannot be understated — and the power of having real-time information on threats and risks that you could face will ensure you stay protected in the long run.
If you’re looking to get started with CTEM but don’t know where to begin, reach out to us today. Our experts will be able to help you get started with protecting your organisation. Contact us today.
