How Exposure Management and Cyber Risk Quantification Power CTEM

If you’ve been anywhere near cybersecurity leadership circles lately, you’ve probably heard the acronym CTEM tossed around a lot. Continuous Threat Exposure Management promises a framework for staying ahead of an endlessly shifting attack surface. But here’s the catch: a framework is only as good as the engines that drive it.

That was the heart of our recent webinar with Gaurav Banga, Founder & CEO of Balbix, and Vinay Sridhara, CTO & Head of Engineering. They peeled back the buzzwords to show how Exposure Management (EM) and Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) together transform CTEM from theory into a repeatable, defensible program that actually reduces risk, and proves it in business terms.

The Three-Phase Risk Reduction Journey

Balbix frames CTEM as a journey in three distinct phases:

1. Visibility — Get accurate, continuous visibility across assets, applications, vulnerabilities, and controls. Without visibility, you can’t quantify or reduce risk.
2. Burndown — With visibility established, focus shifts to shrinking the backlog of exposures down to acceptable risk levels. This is where prioritization, and credibility are earned.
3. Manage — Once backlog risk is reduced, CTEM becomes the day-to-day operating rhythm: continuously identifying, evaluating, prioritizing, and dispatching new issues, while keeping policies and SLAs aligned.

It sounds deceptively simple. But, as both Gaurav and Vinay reminded us, the devil is in the execution.

Visibility: Stop Chasing the Horizon

Everyone wants 100% telemetry. But as Vinay pointed out, that’s a mirage:

“Chasing 100% telemetry is like chasing the horizon. Don’t do that. What matters is knowing where your data is strong, where it’s weak, and making confident decisions from there.”

— Vinay Sridhara

Instead, teams should aim for 80–90% confident telemetry. The key is to organize findings by domain (apps, users, assets), attack the low-coverage areas first, and accept that visibility is never finished, and it’s continuous.

Burndown: From Dashboards to Decisions

Visibility on its own doesn’t win board approval. What wins? Backlog evaporation.

Burndown means compressing your attack surface into a state where risk is measurable and manageable. That requires prioritization at the vulnerability instance level. A Log4j on an external-facing server isn’t the same as Log4j on a quarantined dev machine.

This shift is game-changing: in most enterprises, only 1–2% of exposures actually require urgent remediation. By focusing on that narrow band, powered by automation, security teams can set aggressive SLAs (like resolving critical exposures within two days) without chasing impossible goals.

Managing in Three Scopes

The webinar also explored how to operationalize CTEM across uneven environments. Most organizations don’t start with uniform visibility everywhere. That’s normal.

Balbix recommends running three scopes in parallel:

• Good Telemetry: Start immediate burndown here.
• Telemetry Expansion: Gradually enrich coverage in critical areas.
• Continuous CTEM: In areas already stabilized, shift to fully automated continuous exposure management.

This parallel approach avoids the “boiling the ocean” trap and keeps momentum high.

CRQ: From Exposure Counts to Dollar Impact

At some point, the boardroom question always comes: “What does this mean in dollars?”

That’s where CRQ closes the loop. By defining risk scenarios—who might attack, how, what they’d target, and what it would cost—security leaders can connect technical exposure data directly to financial risk.

“Your CTEM journey is really your risk-reduction journey, and the goal is to keep risk at the right level. EM tells you what to fix, CRQ proves why it matters in business terms.”

— Gaurav Banga

With CRQ integrated, every next-best action carries two metrics: an exposure score and a dollar value of risk reduced. That’s the kind of language executives understand.

From Exposure to Impact

The webinar takeaway was clear: CTEM without EM is vague. CTEM without CRQ is unconvincing. Together, they make cyber risk programs actionable, defensible, and financially aligned.

It’s not about dashboards filled with vulnerabilities. It’s about:

• Seeing with confidence
• Burning down smart
• Managing continuously
• Quantifying in dollars

That’s how you move from exposure to impact, and change the conversation with executives from “How many findings?” to “How much risk did we reduce?”

Want the full discussion? Listen to the webinar recording here: Watch the Recording