It was enough to run scheduled scans when IT environments were largely behind defined network perimeters. But the world is so much more exposed and interconnected now: your employees probably connect remotely from different devices, and attackers are so much faster now that AI tools can probe systems for weaknesses far faster than ever. Point-in-time simply can’t keep pace: by the time your team completes its vulnerability analysis, parts of it may already be outdated. What your organization needs is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).
What is CTEM? How is it different from traditional vulnerability management?
CTEM takes vulnerability management beyond scheduled scanning by continuously examining two things: (1) how weaknesses connect and (2) whether they create a usable route into your environment. Let’s quickly look at how it’s different from traditional methods:
| Traditional vulnerability management | CTEM |
How often it checks | At set intervals | Continuously |
What it looks for | Known software flaws and missing patches | Weaknesses an attacker could combine into an attack path |
What it covers | Assets you already know about and manage | Exposure across your cloud and SaaS environment (including assets that may be harder to track) |
How it sets priorities | Mostly by severity score | By whether the weakness is reachable and exploitable |
Why periodic vulnerability management can’t protect you
The main problem with quarterly vulnerability assessments is that they only show you what was visible at one point in time. But the reality is that your environment changes constantly between scans: new cloud workloads can come online even hours after an assessment, for instance, and the remote devices your employees use can also introduce new points of exposure without warning. And even if your organization has a dedicated IT team, they won’t be able to realistically review every finding faster than new ones appear, especially as large scan reports sometimes hide genuinely urgent exposures.
CTEM services from a third-party provider may be the best fit if your internal team lacks the time or tools to continuously assess exposure across your environment. Instead of leaving your team to work through long lists of vulnerabilities, the provider can help determine which weaknesses need attention first. This approach puts each finding in context by looking at whether an attacker can actually reach and exploit it.
CA provides CTEM services to help you identify which weaknesses pose the greatest risk to your business and prioritize what needs action first. Talk to our team.
