Navigating the CTEM Journey with ZEST Security: A Practical Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is revolutionizing cybersecurity by shifting the focus from merely identifying risks to actively resolving them and significantly reducing an organization's exposure to threats. This practical guide delves into what CTEM entails and its essential building blocks.

What is a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Program?

CTEM is not a singular product or a one-time rollout; it is a maturity journey focused on optimizing existing security investments. It functions as a decision-making framework providing context, prioritization, and operational clarity in risk management. The core principle underlying CTEM is that visibility alone does not equate to security. Instead, it's about actively understanding and reducing an organization's actual exposure to threats. CTEM aims to bridge the "remediation gap" by empowering security and DevOps teams to efficiently tackle cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

The Critical Evolution: Why Traditional Vulnerability Management Falls Short

Traditional vulnerability management (VM) often leaves security teams overwhelmed, struggling with a continuous influx of alerts and inefficient patching cycles. The reality is that over 62% of security incidents originate from backlogged risks that were already known but not remediated in time. Organizations typically take ten times longer to remediate vulnerabilities than attackers take to exploit them. Compounding this challenge, a significant portion of identified risks, 56%, cannot be immediately remediated due to factors such as unavailable patches or legacy systems. This persistent "remediation gap" highlights the urgent need for a more proactive and resolution-focused approach.

The Foundational Pillars of a CTEM Program

A robust CTEM program is built upon five interconnected functional areas, forming a comprehensive approach to managing and reducing threat exposure:

A robust CTEM program is built on five interconnected fundamentals defined by Gartner: Scoping, Discovery, Prioritization, Validation, and Mobilization. Together, these pillars drive a continuous cycle that enables organizations to not only identify risks but also systematically remediate and reduce their exposure.

Scoping:

Define the boundaries and objectives of your CTEM program, with remediation goals in mind. Scoping should clarify which environments, assets, applications, and threat scenarios will be targeted for actionable risk reduction, ensuring remediation resources are focused where they will deliver the greatest security impact.

Discovery:

Continuously identify and catalog all assets, configurations, vulnerabilities, and exposures within your environment. Discovery is the foundation for remediation because you can’t fix what you don’t know exists. This stage includes locating shadow IT, unmanaged cloud resources, and configuration drifts that could delay or complicate remediation efforts if left unaddressed.

Prioritization:

Contextually assess and rank risks based on remediation feasibility and impact. Prioritization should incorporate exploitability, business criticality, internet exposure, and compensating controls to ensure remediation efforts are focused on the highest-value risks first. This process often identifies "quick wins" — fixes that eliminate large clusters of related risks with minimal effort, such as updating a base image or adjusting a misconfigured policy.

Validation:‍

Confirm that remediation or mitigation efforts are effective and sustainable. Validation is critical to preventing recurring risk by verifying that vulnerabilities have been fixed at their source — in infrastructure as code, container images, or cloud configurations — and that guardrails are in place to prevent reintroduction. Automated validation processes shorten feedback loops and keep remediation pipelines efficient.‍

Mobilization:

Drive coordinated remediation by engaging the right stakeholders across security, DevOps, and engineering teams. Mobilization focuses on embedding remediation into workflows through automation, ticketing integration, and clear ownership models. By providing actionable, context-rich remediation paths — such as auto-generated Terraform or Kubernetes fixes — teams can resolve issues quickly and consistently, shrinking the backlog and closing the loop on exposure management.

Practical Guide to Implementing CTEM: Step-by-Step for Security Professionals

This guide outlines technical and practical steps for security engineers to implement CTEM, emphasizing a shift from merely identifying risks to actively resolving them.

1. Comprehensive Asset Discovery: Building Your Technical Foundation

The fundamental principle for any effective exposure management program is that you cannot protect what you do not know exists. Asset discovery must be active, continuous, and independently verifiable, encompassing all physical, virtual, cloud-native, and even shadow IT systems.

• Establish a comprehensive "tech DNA data fabric": Develop a graph and structured database that comprehensively maps your organization's entire technical environment. This includes all assets and services, DevOps deployments, existing tooling, controls, and policies, providing a holistic view crucial for understanding interdependencies.
• Maintain an updated cloud inventory with enrichments: Actively identify and track all cloud infrastructure. This process should also pinpoint unmanaged cloud infrastructure that exists outside of standard deployments, such as Terraform configurations, as drift can introduce significant risk.‍
• Leverage diverse scanning capabilities for initial visibility: If comprehensive visibility is lacking, utilize a suite of scanning tools, including Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and various vulnerability, container, cloud instance, cloud infrastructure misconfiguration, and secret scanning tools.

2. Advanced Scanning & Detection: Beyond Basic Visibility

Effective scanning demands breadth (covering all relevant assets), depth (thorough inspection), and high frequency, given that attackers can weaponize new vulnerabilities within hours of disclosure. Integrating scanning into CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows is paramount to proactively catching risks before they reach production.

• Integrate with existing security tooling: Connect with your current CSPMs and vulnerability management solutions to align discovered risks with remediation and mitigation pathways.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning and root cause tracing: Trace risks from the cloud environment back to their original code. This enables remediation at the root cause directly within IaC, preventing recurring and future risks by embedding security checks directly into CI/CD pipelines. This includes pinpointing the origin of problems, tracing issues back to problematic code or IaC. This helps eliminate thousands of related risks at once by addressing issues at their root cause, whether in IaC, container images, or cloud instances.‍
• Automate scan initiation: Configure scans to trigger automatically based on asset or infrastructure changes, integrating with asset management tools, cloud platforms, and network monitoring. This ensures proactive identification of risks before they reach production.

3. Contextual Prioritization: Focusing on What Matters for You

Prioritization must transcend generic scores like CVSS and EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System), which often lack environment context and can have inaccuracies or delays. It requires incorporating granular organizational context, including internet exposure, business criticality, runtime presence, and the presence of compensating controls.

• Employ a sophisticated risk prioritization mechanism: Prioritize findings based on multiple factors, including risk, exploitability, reachability, business criticality, remediation effort, and potential impact.
• Integrate with threat intelligence (TI) and Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV): Combine traditional metrics (CVSS) with evidence of active exploitation (KEV) and broader threat intelligence to focus on immediate and relevant threats.
• Utilize an "effort-based prioritization" matrix: Categorize risks based on their potential impact and the effort required for remediation. This approach helps identify "Quick Wins"—high-impact, low-effort resolutions that can address numerous issues with a single action, such as a single patch, upgrade, code fix, or configuration change, eliminating thousands of issues at once.
• Incorporate internet exposure and business criticality: Heavily weight internet-exposed assets in prioritization efforts and understand whether an asset supports critical business functions to prioritize vulnerabilities vital for business continuity.
• Determine runtime presence and compensating controls: Assess if a detected vulnerability is in code that is actually running, providing a powerful indicator of exploitability. Evaluate existing security tools (e.g., EDR, IDS/IPS, WAF) as compensating controls that may reduce the likelihood or impact of exploitation. Correlate findings with globally defined cloud security policies, ensuring risks already mitigated are excluded.

4. Proactive Exposure Hunting & Mitigation: Immediate Risk Reduction

Exposure hunting is a proactive, hypothesis-driven approach that correlates vulnerabilities, environmental weaknesses, control gaps, and threat intelligence to uncover risks that standard scanners might miss. A critical aspect of CTEM is the ability to apply mitigations when immediate full remediation isn't possible, reducing exposure windows immediately.

• Operationalize cloud-native guardrails for mitigation: When full remediation (e.g., a code change or patch) cannot be implemented immediately, utilize existing cloud security controls as mitigation pathways. This includes:
  
  • Service Control Policies (SCPs): Implement SCPs to set permission boundaries, restrict actions across accounts, and enforce guardrails. SCPs can prevent malicious users from modifying public S3 buckets, block unauthorized changes to EC2 security groups, prevent deletion of critical resources like EC2 instances, or protect CloudTrail logs from tampering. Identifying resources covered by SCPs helps reduce false positives and focuses remediation efforts on truly exploitable risks. SCPs are particularly useful for limiting exposure when full remediation will take time, or for deprioritizing risks that are effectively addressed by existing strong organizational policies.
  • Other mitigating controls: Mobilize other services like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), SASE, SIG, XDR, CWPP, and GuardDuty to harden configurations, enforce policies, and block attacks without waiting for patches or code changes.
• Analyze existing security guardrails: This involves analyzing cloud security services and guardrails to detect available mitigation measures that allow for the deprioritization of unexploitable risks.

5. Streamlined Communication & Workflow: Bridging the Remediation Gap

The "last mile" of vulnerability management—communicating exposures and driving remediation—is often the most time-consuming and manual part of the process, consuming 6-8 working days per month for prioritization and analytics. Effective CTEM requires clear, timely, and actionable communication, ideally through automated ticketing and integration with ITSM platforms.

• Automate remediation toil: Eliminate manual triage, root cause analysis, fix identification, and prioritization through automation, removing bottlenecks that slow down remediation and saving engineering hours.
• Streamline communication between security and DevOps/engineering: Eliminate weeks of back-and-forth by providing solutions with full context on what's wrong, how it's managed, and how to resolve it. This involves connecting the right team to the right fix.
• Prioritize IAC-based fixes: Automate the generation of remediation solutions, such as Terraform fixes, directly for DevOps teams. This simplifies the process by giving them the resolution, requiring only review and approval, making remediation fast and easy. This includes determining the best path for resolution, tailored to the organization's unique technical DNA and environment.
• Integrate into existing infrastructure and workflows: Natively connect security platforms with your existing ecosystem to streamline the entire risk remediation process end-to-end. This ensures security is embedded into DevOps workflows, from IaC systems to code repositories and CI/CD pipelines.

Establish ownership and timely notification channels: Define responsibilities and SLAs for remediation within your cybersecurity policy and communicate them regularly. Automate the assignment and delivery of tickets to those responsible for remediation.

Conclusion: Beyond Visibility – Achieving True Security

CTEM represents a strategic shift in how organizations understand and act on risk, moving beyond compliance checklists and siloed tools. By adopting CTEM principles and leveraging advanced capabilities, security and DevOps teams can effectively eliminate their risk backlog, significantly enhance their organization's security posture, and shift from simply identifying risks to actively resolving them. The focus moves from merely opening tickets to consistently closing them.

ZEST Security's Approach to Continuous Threat Exposure Management

The CTEM maturity model involves evolving across several functional areas: Asset Discovery, Scanning & Detection, Prioritization, Exposure Hunting, and Communication & Workflow. ZEST Security's platform is designed to provide comprehensive support across these critical stages, particularly focusing on cloud environments

This "remediation gap" is what CTEM aims to bridge, and it's where ZEST Security, an Agentic AI-powered Cloud Risk Resolution platform, steps in to redefine how security and DevOps teams tackle cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. ZEST shifts the focus from merely identifying risks to efficiently resolving them, unifying findings across your security stack and automatically mapping them to prioritized resolution paths that remediate, mitigate, and prevent risk, finally tackling the endless backlog.