Compliance & Risks
CTEM + CREM: Aligning Your Cybersecurity Strategy
Organizations looking to implement CTEM don’t have to start from scratch. CREM can help you get there faster, with actionable insights, automated workflows, and continuous risk reduction.
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Cyber threats evolve daily, and organizations need to move beyond traditional security approaches to stay ahead. That’s why Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), a concept introduced by Gartner, has been gaining traction. CTEM isn’t just another cybersecurity buzzword; it’s a structured, continuous program designed to help organizations identify, assess, and mitigate security risks proactively. If you’re considering implementing a CTEM program, Trend Vision One TM Cyber Risk Exposure Management (CREM) solution—formerly known as Attack Surface Risk Management (ASRM)—can give you a significant head start.
Understanding CTEM
CTEM is a comprehensive program that enables organizations to continuously assess their cybersecurity posture, prioritize exposures based on risk, and take proactive steps to mitigate them. It focuses on five key stages:
Scoping: Defining the assets, environments, and attack surface to monitor.
Discovery: Identifying visible and hidden assets, exposures (vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations) across the previously scoped areas.
Prioritization: Understanding the real-world impact of threats and focusing on the most critical risks, considering factors like urgency, available controls, and business impact rather than attempting to fix every issue.
Validation: Confirm which vulnerabilities are exploitable, analyze potential attack paths, testing and simulating attacks to determine exploitability.
Mobilization: Implementing remediation efforts, automation, security enhancements and clear risk communication.
This continuous cycle ensures that organizations don’t just detect threats but actively reduce their exposure before adversaries can exploit them.
How CREM Aligns with CTEM
Our Cyber Risk Exposure Management solution is built to help organizations execute an effective CTEM program. Here’s how:
Complete Visibility into Your Attack Surface
One of the biggest challenges in CTEM is scoping and discovery. CREM provides continuous attack surface discovery and monitoring, ensuring that organizations have a clear, real-time view of their assets, cloud environments, and third-party risks.
Risk-Based Prioritization
With so many vulnerabilities and exposures to manage, organizations need a better way to focus on the most critical risks. CREM leverages threat intelligence, exploitability insights, attack path analysis and business impact assessments to prioritize exposures effectively, aligning perfectly with CTEM’s risk-based approach.
Exposure Validation and Testing
A key step in CTEM is validating whether an identified vulnerability is actually exploitable. While CREM does not directly integrate penetration testing or real-world attack simulations, we offer services that provide these capabilities as part of the Trend ecosystem, ensuring security teams can test against real-world risks effectively.
Automated Remediation and Workflow Integration
CTEM emphasizes mobilization—ensuring security teams can take swift action. CREM supports automated mitigation workflows, guided remediation steps, and integrations with SOAR and ITSM tools, making it easy to operationalize risk reduction. Also, CREM serves as a critical communication medium that helps bridge the gap between security and business stakeholders, enabling clearer communication of risk to drive smarter decisions fast.
Getting a Head Start with CREM
Organizations looking to implement CTEM don’t have to start from scratch. With CREM, you gain a pre-built framework that aligns with CTEM principles, accelerating your adoption of a proactive exposure management approach.
Instead of scrambling to build out CTEM capabilities in-house, CREM provides:
- Faster time-to-value with built-in attack surface visibility, risk prioritization, and mitigation.
- Proactive security outcomes by ensuring exposures are assessed and addressed continuously.
- Seamless integration with existing security tools and a services ecosystem to enhance efficiency and response times.
Conclusion
As cybersecurity threats become more sophisticated, organizations need to move from reactive defense to proactive exposure management. CTEM provides the strategic approach, and CREM delivers the capabilities to execute it effectively. If you’re looking to build a CTEM program, CREM can help you get there faster, with actionable insights, automated workflows, and continuous risk reduction.
Ready to take the next step? Let’s talk about how Trend Vision One™ Cyber Risk Exposure Management can support your CTEM journey.