A recent 2026 market study of 128 senior security decision‑makers reveals a clear split between enterprises that have adopted Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and those that still rely on traditional, fragmented security practices. The divide is not primarily about budget or industry. It is driven by whether an organization has implemented a continuous, risk‑based approach to managing its attack surface.
Who Took Part in the Study and What Sets CTEM Leaders Apart
The research sample consisted mostly of senior professionals: 85% of respondents hold positions at Manager level or above, and 66% represent large enterprises with more than 5,000 employees. The survey covered high‑risk, highly regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, and retail, where downtime and data breaches are particularly costly.
Only 16% of organizations report that they have already implemented CTEM. The remaining 84% still depend on periodic vulnerability scans, point tools, and ad‑hoc risk projects. At the same time, 87% of security leaders acknowledge that CTEM is important for their future security posture. This creates a notable paradox: awareness is high, but operational transformation is still the exception, not the rule.
Companies that have deployed CTEM programs show measurable advantages. They report 50% better visibility of their attack surface, adoption of protective controls higher by 23 percentage points, and consistently more mature threat awareness across all dimensions measured in the study.
What Is CTEM and How It Differs from “Patching Everything”
CTEM is not a single tool, but a framework for continuous management of cyber exposures. Instead of reacting to every vulnerability as it appears, CTEM establishes an ongoing cycle that aligns technical security work with business risk.
In practice, CTEM focuses on three core activities: continuously discovering all elements of the external attack surface (domains, cloud resources, web applications, third‑party scripts and components), validating which attack paths are realistically exploitable, and prioritizing only those exposures that can cause material business impact. Everything else is deprioritized, scheduled, or accepted as residual risk with clear justification.
Gartner positions CTEM as an evolution of traditional vulnerability and risk management, moving from periodic, snapshot‑style assessments to continuous, threat‑informed validation. Organizations that adopt this approach typically reduce noise, improve mean time to remediation, and gain a security posture that can keep pace with modern, fast‑changing digital environments.
Why CTEM Awareness Rarely Translates into Deployment
The gap between understanding CTEM and actually deploying it reflects a broader strategic dilemma in cybersecurity: what should be prioritized right now. Security leaders face entrenched IT architectures, legacy processes, and competing digital transformation initiatives, all within tight budget constraints.
In many enterprises, resources are consumed by firefighting urgent incidents instead of building systematic, continuous risk management capabilities. Meanwhile, external pressure is increasing. 91% of CISOs report growth in incidents linked to third parties, and industry analyses such as IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach” report place the average cost of a data breach at around USD 4.4 million. At the same time, standards like PCI DSS 4.0.1 impose stricter requirements for continuous monitoring, documentation, and reporting.
As a result, managing the attack surface is no longer just an operational concern for the security team; it is becoming a recurring topic at the board level, directly tied to financial, legal, and reputational risk.
Attack Surface Complexity and the Growing Visibility Gap
The study clearly illustrates how digital expansion amplifies cyber risk. When an organization operates 0–10 domains, around 5% of observed attacks in the dataset target them. In the range of 51–100 domains, this share jumps to 18%, and beyond 100 domains, the attack curve rises sharply.
The main driver is the visibility gap: the difference between assets the company is legally and operationally responsible for, and assets it is actually aware of and monitoring. Each new domain typically depends on dozens of related resources, cloud services, and third‑party scripts. The total number of potential entry points quickly reaches into the thousands.
As this environment grows, manual inventories of integrations, scripts, and dependencies become unmanageable. Responsibility becomes blurred, and “shadow” or “dark” assets appear that no one actively owns or monitors. Annual audits and periodic vulnerability scans cannot keep the picture up to date.
When Traditional Security Models Stop Scaling
Comparative analysis of the respondents shows a consistent pattern. Below a certain level of complexity—limited domains and a simple IT architecture—organizations can still rely on periodic checks and partially manual processes. However, as the attack surface expands, these models no longer scale: workload for security teams increases faster than their tools and processes can handle.
Enterprises that have adopted CTEM demonstrate higher automation, broader asset coverage, and faster rollout of protective controls. For organizations with a complex, hybrid or multi‑cloud landscape, the strategic question becomes less “Do we need CTEM?” and more “Can our current approach keep up with the risk dynamics without CTEM?”
Practical Steps for Moving Toward CTEM
For organizations ready to modernize their cyber risk management, transitioning to CTEM is best approached in stages rather than as a one‑time project.
1. Build a comprehensive attack surface inventory. Automate discovery of domains, subdomains, cloud and SaaS services, external web resources, third‑party scripts, and exposed APIs. This creates the baseline for closing the visibility gap.
2. Add business context to technical assets. Map assets to business processes, data types, compliance obligations, and accountable owners. This enables risk‑based decisions that prioritize exposures with real impact on revenue, operations, or regulation.
3. Implement continuous risk validation. Use attack path modeling, breach and attack simulation, external attack surface management, and automated security testing to confirm which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable, instead of reacting to every item in a scan report.
4. Integrate CTEM into existing workflows. Embed CTEM outputs into vulnerability management, DevSecOps pipelines, and incident response playbooks. Define clear metrics—such as reduction in unknown assets, time to remediate high‑risk exposures, or percentage of business‑critical assets under continuous monitoring—and report them regularly to senior management.
The evidence from the market is increasingly consistent: enterprises that invest in continuous exposure management and attack surface visibility gain clear advantages in detection, response speed, and resilience to incidents. Organizations still relying on sporadic audits and manual oversight should reassess their own visibility gap and develop a pragmatic roadmap toward CTEM. In the current threat landscape and regulatory climate, CTEM is no longer a buzzword but an essential step for staying secure, compliant, and competitive.
