9 Reasons CTEM Needs to be in Your 2025 Budget

With the summer over and Q3 in full swing, that can only mean one thing – it’s time to get 2025 budgets in order. And across many areas of business, getting budgets for projects or initiatives isn’t as “simple” as it once was. Belt-tightening is now a common occurrence and many departments are faced with a reality of doing more with less. 

Thankfully, according to Forrester, Security budgets have largely been spared from this phenomenon, owing to factors like regulatory pressures, cyber insurance directives, and customer expectations. In fact, Forrester’s new Budget Planning Survey, 2024 says that of the leaders they polled, most “expect budgets to keep rising in the next 12 months, with 10% anticipating an increase of more than 10% in the next 12 months.” This is really positive news; it means that despite a general lack of excess budgetary allotment, decision makers have started to understand that security initiatives are a cornerstone of building a resilient business. 

Vulnerability Management is So 10 Years Ago….

Great. So we’ve established that security budgets aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Now let’s talk about why that makes 2025 the perfect time to get the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework from Gartner on your budget. 

If you’re a CISO (as is one of the authors of this blog, with the other being the VP Sales), it’s your job to ensure the safeguarding of your organization’s sensitive data and critical infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated attacks. As such, you likely already have a line item for your vulnerability management tool on the budget. But while that approach was once-upon-a-time the optimal route, traditional vulnerability management approaches are no longer sufficient to keep pace with the speed and complexity of today’s threats. 

Here are some of the issues with old-school vulnerability management:

• It often focuses on periodic scans and patch management, leaving organizations exposed to threats that emerge between scans. This is reactive and inadequate in today’s fast-paced threat environment.
• It’s missing context to prioritize issues effectively, leading to inefficient resource allocation. 
• It produces endless lists of exposures and siloed processes that again, lack context, including CVEs, alerts from EDR, alerts from SIEM, misconfigurations, user permissions, gaps in compliance, pen test results, red team results, exceptions, etc,. 
• It creates a disconnect with IT teams who are left drowning in alerts and have essentially tuned out, since every request from security appears to be critical.  

This outdated approach plays right into the hands of the attacker. So while we work our way through these long lists, attackers are able to move through networks unhindered – and defenders can’t see the paths attackers use to reach critical assets, leading to ineffective prioritization. Instead we focus disproportionately on CVEs, while many attacks don’t even use them!

The impact is that risk is hard to quantify and board reporting can become very challenging. Moreover, prioritization is broken, which means we can’t see/focus on what’s really important.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to adapt easily to the needs of the business and we can’t respond with agility to changes in the threat landscape. 

9 Reasons CTEM Should be on Your Budget in 2025

CTEM was born out of the recognition that the previous method wasn’t sustainable. It’s a proactive and continuous five-stage program, or framework, that reduces exposure to cyber attacks. CTEM revolutionizes traditional vulnerability management and provides a proactive, comprehensive strategy for identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating cyber risks. 

If you’re thinking about your budget for 2025 and what should be prioritized, here are 6 reasons CTEM needs to be front and center:

• Provides Continuous Visibility:

CTEM provides continuous visibility into an organization’s attack surface, allowing for real-time identification of new vulnerabilities and exposures. This proactive approach enables organizations to address threats before they can be exploited. You get the opposition’s playbook, which allows for more effective risk prioritization and mitigation.

• Grants Context-Aware Prioritization:

CTEM goes beyond simple vulnerability scores to provide context-aware prioritization, considering factors such as asset criticality, threat intelligence, and exploitability. This ensures that resources are focused on the most critical risks. 

• Proactively Mitigates Risk:

CTEM enables organizations to proactively approach risk mitigation, addressing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. This reduces the likelihood of successful attacks and minimizes their impact.

• Improves Efficiency:

CTEM streamlines vulnerability management processes, automating many manual tasks and reducing the burden on security teams. This frees up resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.

• Enhances Collaboration:

CTEM fosters collaboration between security and IT teams, breaking down silos and enabling a more unified approach to risk management. This improves communication and coordination, leading to more effective risk mitigation.

• Grants Threat Intelligence:

CTEM taps into current threat data to understand the latest attack trends and tactics and adapts its testing process. This helps you anticipate where threat actors are likely to strike next.

• Streamlines Vulnerability Management Processes:

An effectively built CTEM program automates many manual tasks, which reduces the burden on security teams and improves efficiency.

• Maximizes Security ROI: 

CTEM drives down costs associated with security breaches by proactively identifying and remediating them, helping you get the most value from your limited security budgets.

1. Enables Better Reporting: 

With CTEM, you can clearly identify what needs to be remediated first to significantly impact your risk level and provide quantifiable risk insights for optimal board reporting, to enable informed decision-making and effective mitigation.

CTEM in 2025 For The Win

CTEM is more than just a new way of doing vulnerability management or a repackaging of tools or solutions – it actually represents a shift in perspective. It’s a proactive cybersecurity strategy that goes beyond individual tools – combining elements from multiple tools, practices and methodologies and more into a new way of thinking. If you’re looking to get the most out of your budget, there’s no question – CTEM is one of the most impactful long-term strategies you can implement.