Beyond Compliance: The Case for Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Organisations must transform their threat exposure management practices to stay in control of their cyber security and minimise risk of disruption. This shift is essential to meet the growing volume and velocity of disruptions driven by today’s increasingly volatile threat environment.

Managing an effective cyber security posture is already a problem for many organisations. Limited visibility and context around emerging threats makes their prevention difficult. And, according to a recent blog, adversaries aided by AI-enhanced tools will increase the number and potentially the potency, of cyber-attacks on enterprises. To protect their systems and improve their resilience, organisations must operationalise threat exposure management practices and ensure they are fit for purpose.

The threat mitigation process has always been important

AI is set to streamline business operations, but equally adversaries too will reap similar benefits. New reasoning and agentic AI models will allow even lesser skilled hackers to easily research and orchestrate attacks. The results are likely to be more frequent or damaging breaches. Security teams, already racing to find and fix vulnerabilities before they’re exploited, will be stretched even further.

Effective threat exposure management has always been a priority. However higher operating threat levels mean that organisations must be more diligent in their collection and analysis of the evidence-based intelligence necessary to quickly inform their specific mitigation efforts. Timely, actionable intelligence is critical in maintaining cyber posture and preventing disruption to operations.

Non-compliance is now more important than compliance

Measuring compliance against a cyber security framework is an important performance indicator, but knowing what security controls are not compliant is far more important from a threat exposure perspective. Without visibility and context vulnerabilities can remain undetected, as unmitigated threats, in your environment. So in today’s volatile threat environment effective threat exposure management practices must be dynamic. They must have reliable, data-driven assessments that evidence operational resilience through continuous threat visibility and actionable intelligence.

While AI-assisted vulnerability identification and exploitation will not actually create vulnerabilities; the lack of visibility and context about emerging threats will certainly increase the potential for them to remain undiscovered and open to exploit.

Here’s what’s changed

In some ways, not much. Many of these advances are simply risk management principles to threat exposure. Managing security operations in the current threat environment has been too complex and arbitrary for too long. In the absence of evidence-based threat exposure management, sampling and subjective techniques provide little assurance of the accuracy of the information for either security or management teams. Last year alone, more than 40,000 new common vulnerabilities or exposures were added to the threat environment – a 38% increase. And any such rise, AI-assisted or otherwise, will further stretch threat management practices and bring into greater question the levels of operational, financial and reputational risks implied in current compliance reporting.

Why is this important?

All risk management stakeholders need better intelligence to address these challenges. They also require ongoing visibility of emerging threats that could impact their key IT assets. The accurate and ongoing measurement of cyber security control effectiveness levels is critical to fully informing the ongoing success of cyber security prevention strategies. It’s becoming a numbers game. The number of new vulnerabilities continues to rise. Without autonomous threat exposure management, the chances of finding them will only shrink. And without relevant and reliable actionable intelligence, arbitrary compliance information can only sustain sub-optimal cyber security outcomes.

In another recent blog, organisations are advocating an autonomous platform to integrate threat information with SIEM, vulnerability scanners and other technologies for “real-time, actionable cyber risk insights.” That capability is already well established. Automated data-driven threat exposure management platforms provide continuous, evidence-based telemetry to inform effective threat governance, underpinned by dynamic and actionable threat management and reporting.

Rather than predictive, the threat exposure management model must include systematic information to support an ongoing and dynamic process. A management loop that identifies and responds to emerging vulnerabilities to continuously monitor and improve the effectiveness of controls. Organisations must automate this to achieve it at speed and scale.

In the absence of local evidence-based observations, the ongoing effectiveness of mitigation strategies on current controls and policies is difficult to measure and validate. Similarly, relying on historical risk data, integrated AI, and black box models, without locally measured control effectiveness, undermines confidence. It reduces trust in both the quality and relevance of the threat exposure management process.

The operational priority of effective threat exposure management

Without a locally data-driven autonomous platform, organisations face visibility issues with unreliable threat data. Potentially lagging the real-time state of threat exposure. Traditional assessments are slow, disruptive and imprecise. Autonomous CTEM platforms are now part of business-as-usual. They provide continuous threat exposure monitoring, prioritisation, and reporting for both internal and external cyber security stakeholders.

In fact, they represent the only way that enterprises can expect to maintain their security posture and meet their growing governance and enterprise resilience obligations [1].

Find out more about Autonomous Threat Exposure Management platforms. Huntsman’s Auditor, SmartCheck and Scorecard solutions play a role in dynamic cyber security risk management and enterprise resilience.

Contact us today.

[1] Hype Cycle for Security Operations – 2025, Gartner Inc, June 23^rd 2025