Here we outline the nine best practices for implementing a robust CTEM program, providing practical guidance, recommended technologies, and actionable metrics to mature your organization's exposure management capabilities.

1.

Maintain a Comprehensive and Up-to-Date Asset Inventory

2.

Develop a Broad Exposure Management Program

3.

Conduct Regular Exposure Assessments

4.

Prioritize Exposures Based on Risk

5.

Implement Timely Treatment of Exposures

6.

Leverage Advanced Technologies

7.

Measure Progress

8.

Collaborate Internally and with Third Parties

9.

Regularly Internally and Update the Program

These best practices
are traced to the 5 stages of CTEM

1. Scoping

Define what to assess by identifying the environments, assets, and business processes that matter most.

2. Discovery

Continuously uncover assets, exposures, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and attack paths across the scoped environment.

3. Prioritization

Assess and rank exposures based 
on business context, exploitability, and potential impact.

4. Validation

Simulate or test if prioritized exposures are exploitable and whether defenses are working effectively.

5. Mobilization

Coordinate and drive timely remediation, mitigation or risk approval actions across teams.

Discovery
1.
Maintain a Comprehensive and Up-to-Date Asset Inventory

An effective CTEM program starts with visibility. You cannot protect what you cannot see. Maintaining a comprehensive asset inventory ensures you know exactly what exists across your digital environment.

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Best Practices
  • Automate Discovery and Inventory: Use tools to continuously identify and monitor digital assets, including endpoints, applications, and cloud resources. Monitor both commissioned and decommissioned assets.
  • Update Regularly: Ensure inventory reflects additions, removals, and changes in assets.
  • Include Critical Details: Capture asset type, location, owner, purpose, and associated risks.
  • Classify Assets: Identify which assets are critical to the organization’s operations and hold sensitive information and use consistent labels.
  • Identify Unmanaged Assets: Ensure the inventory includes often overlooked assets, such as SaaS, BYOD, serverless, containers, and microservices.
  • Define Asset Ownership: Assign ownership for accountability, remediation, and lifecycle management.
Scoping
2.
Develop a Broad Exposure Management Program 

CTEM should be a cross-functional, policy-driven program that integrates with business and IT processes.

CTEM should be a cross-functional, policy-driven program that integrates with business and IT processes.

Best Practices
  • Establish Clear Policies and Procedures: Define the scope, roles, and responsibilities for exposure management within the organization. This includes setting up a structured framework to identify, assess, and remediate exposures.
  • Centralize Management: Ensure a uniform – centralized and standardized - view and management of exposures from a people, process and technology perspective, across all sources, business units, teams, etc. 
Discovery
Validation
3.
Conduct Regular Exposure Assessments 

Regular exposure assessments ensure that vunlerabilities and misconfigurations are discovered before adversaries exploit them.

Not all exposures carry equal weight. Prioritization is key to optimizing resource allocation and mitigating the highest risks first.

Best Practices
  • Conduct Regular Scans: Use scanning tools to maintain an up-to-date view of exposures, at a frequency derived from the organization's risk tolerance, compliance mandates, and type of assets.
  • Validate Manually: Complement automated processes with human oversight to verify findings and uncover complex exposures that automated tools might miss.
Prioritization
4.
Prioritize Exposures Based on Risk 

Not all exposures carry equal weight. Prioritization is key to optimizing resource allocation and mitigating the highest risks first.

Not all exposures carry equal weight. Prioritization is key to optimizing resource allocation and mitigating the highest risks first.

Not all exposures carry equal weight. Prioritization is key to optimizing resource allocation and mitigating the highest risks first.

Best Practices
  • Adopt a Risk-Based Approach: Evaluate exposures based on their potential impact and exploitability, focusing on those that pose the highest risk to critical assets.
  • Find the Root Cause: Go beyond symptoms to address systemic issues. Uncover fundamental causes and interconnected components and implement comprehensive measures to prevent exposures from recurring.
  • Utilize Threat Intelligence: Incorporate real-time threat intelligence to understand the current threat landscape and adjust prioritization accordingly.
  • Use Contextual Risk Indicators: Apply frameworks like Tonic's Contextualized Risk Indicator to assess severity, criticality, sensitivity, reachability, exploitability, and resilience.
Mobilization
Validation
5.
Implement Timely Treatment of Exposures 

Prompt action reduces the attack window and limits potential damage.

Prompt action reduces the attack window and limits potential damage.

Best Practices
  • Automate Remediation: Employ orchestration tools for fast, policy-aligned remediation.
  • Validate the Fix: Conduct follow-up assessments to verify effectiveness. Continuous monitoring ensures that exposures have been successfully addressed, and identifies new issues that may arise.
  • Test in Safe Environments: Simulate and test remediation measures before applying to production.
  • Track Exceptions: Document risk acceptance and compensating controls, while ensuring all temporary controls have expiration and review dates. 
Discovery
Scoping
6.
Leverage Advanced Technologies 

A successful CTEM program integrates tools across various domains of security.

A successful CTEM program integrates tools across various domains of security.

Recommended Technologies:
  • Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM)/ Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP)
  • Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)
  • External Attack Surface Management (EASM)
  • Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
  • Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) 
  • Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) 
7.
Measure Progress 

Tracking progress with meaningful metrics helps optimize performance and communicate with stakeholders.

Tracking progress with meaningful metrics helps optimize performance and communicate with stakeholders.

Recommneded Metrics:
Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR)

Time from vulnerability identification to resolution.

Open vs. Closed Findings

Number of unresolved vs. resolved findings over time.

SLA Compliance

Percentage of findings fixed within defined SLA limits.

New Findings by Discovery Date

Number of newly discovered findings each day.

Average Vulnerability Age

Time between public disclosure and remediation.

Patch Compliance Rate

Percentage of systems with up-to-date security patches.

Recurrence Rate

Percentage of findings that reappear after being marked as resolved.

Scan Coverage

Percentage of assets that have undergone vulnerability scanning.

Scan Frequency

Average time between vulnerability assessments.

Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

Time from public disclosure to detection in your environment.

Best Practices
  • Enable Regular Reporting: Provide dashboards and periodic reports to CISOs, IT leaders, and the board.
  • Make Metrics Actionable: Tie KPIs to business decisions and continuous improvement efforts.
Additional guidance:

A popular type of metric is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - a measurable value or target that indicates how effectively an organization or individual is achieving keybusiness objectives. KPIs are used to evaluate the success of an organization, department, project, or individual in meeting performance targets. KPIs are typically quantitative and are chosen based on their relevance to the critical success factors of the organization.

By looking at several key indicators, businesses can identify successes, as well as what is not working. Analyzing KPIs on a regular basis provides a solid overview of how well a business is performing, and enables informed decision making on operaitons and strategy.

Good KPIs (and metrics in general) are SMART:

  • Specific: Based on a clearly understood goal; clear and concise.
  • Measurable: Can be measured; quantifiable; objective.
  • Attainable: Realistic; based on achievable goals and values.
  • Relevant: Directly related to a specific activity or goal; relevant to improving outcomes
  • Timely: Grounded in a specific time frame.

Additional characteristics of good KPIs:

  • Accurate: Not exact science; a reasonable degree of accuracy is generally adequate
  • Cost-effective: The measurements should not be too expensive to acquire or maintain.
  • Repeatable: The ability to measure the KPI must be able to be acquired reliably over time.
  • Predictive: The KPI should be indicative of outcomes.
  • Actionable: It should be clear to the “customer” of the KPI what action must be taken.
8.
Collaborate Internally and with Third Parties 

Exposure management is a shared responsibility. Success depends on alignment across departments and the supply chain.

Exposure management is a shared responsibility. Success depends on alignment across departments and the supply chain.

Best Practices
  • Assign Ownership: Clarify accountability across IT, security, DevOps, and infrastructure teams.
  • Engage the Business: Regularly brief business unit stakeholders and escalate blockers.
  • Enable Cross-Functional Collaboration: Use workflow platforms to integrate efforts across teams.
  • Evaluate Vendor Risk: Ensure third-party providers meet your exposure management standards.
9.
Regularly Review and Update the Program 

CTEM must evolve to stay relevant as threats, technologies, and business priorities change.

CTEM must evolve to stay relevant as threats, technologies, and business priorities change.

Best Practices
  • Continuous Improvement: Use retrospectives and lessons learned to iterate on your program.
  • Perform Audit and Compliance Checks: Ensure alignment with internal policies and industry regulations.

Final Thoughts

Building an effective CTEM program isn’t a one-time initiative. It’s a continuous cycle of discovery, assessment, prioritization, treatment, and measurement. By adopting these best practices, organizations can reduce their attack surface, mitigate risk faster, and align cybersecurity efforts with business outcomes.

Investing in the right technologies, processes, and people will allow your organization to move from reactive patching to strategic exposure management. In today’s dynamic threat landscape, this is not just a technical imperative - it’s a business necessity.

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