A brand new 2026 market intelligence research of 128 enterprise safety decision-makers (accessible right here) reveals a stark divide forming between organizations – one which has nothing to do with price range measurement or trade and the whole lot to do with a single framework choice. Organizations implementing Steady Menace Publicity Administration (CTEM) reveal 50% higher assault floor visibility, 23-point greater resolution adoption, and superior risk consciousness throughout each measured dimension. The 16% who’ve carried out it are pulling away. The 84% who have not are falling behind.
The Demographics of the Divide
The analysis surveyed a senior cohort: 85% of respondents are Supervisor-level or above, representing organizations the place 66% make use of 5,000+ folks throughout finance, healthcare, and retail sectors.
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What’s CTEM?
Should you aren’t acquainted, CTEM entails shifting from “patch the whole lot reactively” to “constantly uncover, validate, and prioritize threat exposures that may truly harm the enterprise.” It is extensively mentioned in cybersecurity now as a next-generation evolution of publicity/threat administration, and the brand new report reinforces Gartner’s view that companies adopting it would persistently reveal stronger safety outcomes than people who don’t.
Consciousness Is Excessive. Adoption Is Uncommon.
One shocking discovering: There doesn’t appear to be an issue with consciousness, simply implementation. 87% of safety leaders acknowledge the significance of CTEM, however solely 16% have translated that consciousness into operational actuality. So, in the event that they’ve heard of it, why aren’t they utilizing it?
The hole between consciousness and implementation reveals fashionable safety’s central dilemma: which precedence wins? Safety leaders perceive the CTEM conceptually however wrestle to promote its advantages within the face of organizational inertia, competing priorities, and price range constraints that power unimaginable tradeoffs. The problem of gaining administration buy-in is one motive why we ready this report: to offer the statistics that make the enterprise case unimaginable to disregard.
Complexity is the New Multiplier
For instance: Past a sure threshold, guide monitoring of all the extra integrations, scripts, and dependencies breaks down, possession blurs, and blind spots multiply. The analysis makes it clear that assault floor complexity is not only a administration problem; it is a direct threat multiplier.
We are able to see this clearly within the graph under. Assault charges rise linearly from 5% (0-10 domains) to 18% (51-100 domains), then rise steeply previous 100 domains.
This sudden enhance is pushed by the ‘visibility hole’, the gulf between the property an organization is chargeable for monitoring and people it’s conscious of. Every extra area can add dozens of related property, and when the depend climbs previous 100, this will translate to 1000’s of extra scripts: each a doable assault vector. Conventional snapshot safety can’t hope to log and monitor all of them. Solely CTEM-driven applications can present the oversight to constantly establish and validate the darkish property hiding on this visibility hole – earlier than attackers do.
Why This Issues Now
Safety leaders are at present going through a ‘good storm’ of calls for. At a time when 91% of CISOs report a rise in third-party incidents, common breach prices have climbed to $4.44M, and PCI DSS 4.0.1 brings stricter monitoring and the ever-present specter of penalties. With this in thoughts, the report reveals that assault floor administration has grow to be a difficulty for the boardroom as a lot because the server room, and the C-suite reader can solely conclude that persevering with to belief guide oversight and periodic controls to handle such a posh, high-stakes problem can be self-destructive.
One of many clearest indicators on this analysis comes from the peer benchmarking information. When organizations evaluate themselves facet by facet – by assault floor measurement, visibility, tooling, and outcomes – a sample emerges that’s tough to disregard: past a sure degree of complexity, conventional safety approaches cease scaling.
The takeaway from the peer benchmarks is evident: under a sure degree of publicity, organizations can depend on periodic controls and guide oversight. Above it, these fashions now not maintain. For safety leaders working in high-complexity environments, the query is now not whether or not CTEM is effective – it’s whether or not their present strategy can realistically sustain with out it.
Obtain the complete market analysis right here.
