Quantifying and Controlling Your Organization’s Entire Risk Surface

It used to be we could rely on solid perimeters to keep the bad actors out of our systems. An excellent tall firewall, regular scans to catch vulnerabilities, perimeter security felt like enough. But those days are gone. Headlines are a blur of devastating breaches at major companies as hackers find creative new ways in – no matter how solid and sophisticated the defenses.

The uncomfortable truth is that every organization is a potential target these days. Though you may have perimeter protections in place, hackers are finding creative new intrusion paths to exploit. No business can afford to ignore the rising threat levels and assume it is safe.

Rather than an impenetrable barrier, we need to start viewing security as an adaptive process. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) represents a new model that aims to provide greater visibility into internal systems, real-time risk detection, and nimble response capabilities. By continually monitoring, quantifying, and minimizing vulnerabilities, the impact of an inevitable breach can potentially be contained. Let’s dive a bit deeper to find out why.

The Limitations of Periodic Assessments

You’ve probably all spent a lot of time and money on various cybersecurity checks – risk assessments, audits, penetration tests, etc. These periodic snapshots can uncover some vulnerabilities or gaps, but we know they only show one moment. In reality, an organization’s risk exposure is constantly shifting. New threats emerge, configurations change, permissions get tweaked, and users do unexpected things – your attack surface continuously expands and contracts. By the time you get the following assessment, the landscape has likely changed significantly.

This means there are these enormous windows of uncertainty between checkpoints where risk can quietly accumulate before the next cycle comes around. Periodic evaluations also need help to quantify potential business impact in concrete terms. Manual guesses and expert judgments don’t translate into complex numbers you can analyze and decide about. And when assessments only examine siloed parts of your environment, it’s tough to grasp holistic risk levels and how different exposures might interact.

The result is that leadership often needs to be more active – responding to incidents rather than proactively minimizing danger. There’s too much uncertainty and insufficient real-time visibility to enable data-driven choices. But what if we could tip the scales in a more positive direction?

Embracing Continuous Risk Insights

CTEM represents a seismic shift – from periodic to continuous insights, siloed to unified risk analysis, speculative to quantified impact analysis, and defensive to adaptive security. Fundamentally transforming how exposure is measured and managed enables resilience through understanding.

Instead of point-in-time audits, CTEM leverages automated asset discovery, security instrumentation, threat intel feeds, and advanced analytics to map your risk terrain in real-time. This produces an empirical model of your entire exposure surface—both cyclic (e.g., testing environments) and persistent (e.g., production) assets across IT, clouds, OT systems, and more.

With continuous eyes on changes to these environments and visibility into new exploits, zero days, and attacker trends, your risk exposure can be tracked and trended – much like monitoring vital signs. Security teams gain an intuitive dashboard showing exposure and potential event loss quantified in dollars over time. Just as concerning blood pressure readings would prompt intervention to minimize health impacts, spikes in risk exposure direct proactive decisions.

By condensing current and predicted risk into easily digested metrics aligned to business priorities, CTEM also helps democratize security insights for leadership. Executives and board members no longer need specialized expertise to grasp imperatives. Risk becomes an empirical guidepost linked to strategic and financial outcomes, enabling practices like cyber risk forecasting and better-aligning security to corporate goals.

Consolidating Your Internal and External Risk

A key CTEM breakthrough is assessing threats across both internal environments AND external surfaces – from domains to clouds to social media. This produces a single exposure model encompassing all attack vectors that could impact operations or information assets.

Internally, the platform utilizes several techniques to continuously discover managed and unmanaged assets, determine software vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, model access pathways, pinpoint confidential data stores, and more—even in complex hybrid technology environments. Critical gaps and changes raise alerts to prioritize action.

Externally, CTEM examines the interconnected digital footprint of domains, services, SaaS apps, social media accounts, and code repos. Malware, exploitable bugs, credential leaks, policy violations, and emerging threats spotted across assets inform overall risk exposure. This outside-in view reveals unseen connections and paths for lateral movement between assets.

Fusing internal and external perspectives provides an unprecedented context of how threats traverse and link environments. It illuminates a more nuanced exposure specific to your digital ecosystem compared to generic assessments. This enables smarter optimization of security controls and processes, investing in capabilities that mitigate the most likely attacks.

Translating Risk Into Financial Impact

CTEM platforms give organizations a unified view of their cyber risks. But to truly motivate action up and down the management chain, we need to connect those risks to real business impacts. Put simply, risk should be expressed in dollars and cents – a language every executive speaks.

CTEM can estimate likely financial losses from various cyberattack scenarios by integrating advanced analytics with financial systems. These estimates are tailored to each company using machine learning models that analyze patterns from similar past incidents.

The end result is a forecast of risk exposure translated into potential dollar losses from events. With financial impact quantified, leadership can now weigh the costs of additional security controls versus potential damage. It shifts the conversation from cybersecurity as a cost center to cybersecurity as a strategic investment with measurable ROI.

Leaders no longer have to guess at the business impacts of cyber incidents. The links to financials are baked right into the platform, bringing clarity to decision-making up and down the management ladder.

Final Word

The bottom line: With Continuous Threat Exposure Management, organizations can finally achieve resilience through understanding. CTEM brings unprecedented visibility, quantification, and adaptability to reveal and minimize their most dangerous risks in financial terms that leadership can rally behind. It’s a fundamentally more proactive way to match security priorities to business priorities while navigating increasing uncertainty.

Rather than crossed fingers or blind trust in defenses, executives have an empirical compass showing true exposure. Leadership no longer has to wait for the next assessment or incident report nervously. The platform delivers clarity and control through continuous risk insights. Confidence replaces fear.