Implementing an Effective Gartner® CTEM Program with Armis Centrix™ Cyber Exposure Management Platform

The ever-evolving threat landscape and the growing sophistication of adversaries, together with the continuous expansion of the enterprises’ attack surfaces, pose significant challenges to cybersecurity professionals. CIOs and CISOs are struggling to identify and handle the flood of weaknesses and exposures on their attack surface, determine what to focus on, and how to remediate or mitigate it in an effective way. Moreover, they are continuously struggling with insufficient visibility into their growing attack surface and the many hidden issues that are always being looked for by bad actors as entry points into their networks.

To effectively manage cyber exposures, Gartner recommends that Security Leaders implement continuous and repeatable exposure management processes. The Gartner Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is an umbrella program for forward-looking and sustainable approaches to exposure reduction. This framework was named a top strategic technology trend for 2024 as described in the Gartner report, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024: Continuous Threat Exposure Management.

The CTEM framework impacts existing technology markets with the convergence of cybersecurity validation and exposure assessment platforms. According to Gartner, “By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments, based on a continuous threat exposure management program, will realize a two-third reduction in breaches.” The Armis Centrix™ platform provides powerful capabilities that allow for the implementation of an effective CTEM program.

According to the report, “CTEM is a systemic approach to continuously refine cybersecurity optimization priorities. Its objective is to design actionable security exposure remediation and improvement plans that business executives can understand, and that architecture teams can act on. A CTEM cycle includes five stages: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization. Organizations building a CTEM program use tools to inventory and categorize assets and vulnerabilities, and simulate or test attack scenarios and other forms of posture assessment processes and technologies.”

How does Armis contribute to a CTEM program?

Armis Centrix™ platform enables an effective implementation of a comprehensive CTEM program. The platform supports the following core elements:

• Monitor – Find all connected assets, including IT, IoT, OT, IoMT, IIOT, cloud, and applications, and for each asset, provide a granular contextualized intelligence record. In addition, Armis CentrixTM analyzes an abundance of telemetry from a large variety of sources, including IT and security tools, as well as network traffic, and provides a complete network map that covers connections to and from assets, virtual and physical segments, and the external internet, as well as application and service mapping.
• Discover Exposures – Armis Centrix™ discovers potential exposures that can be posed by various weak points such as outdated operating systems and applications, CVEs, default credentials, malfunctioning protection agents, insecure protocols usage, bad segmentation, security controls coverage issues, external facing assets, and much more, in order to provide a complete contextual picture of all risks and exposures.
• Detect Threats – Continuously analyze in real-time every piece of telemetry from every source, including IT and security tools, as well as network traffic, and detect malicious and suspicious threats and asset behaviors.
• Prioritize – Armis Centrix™ fully configurable rule-based policy engine enables prioritization of the assets that are most likely to be exploited. It is based on a combination of urgency, severity, threat intelligence, and real world weaponization data, availability of compensating controls, and level of business risk posed to the organization.
• Orchestrate – Armis Centrix™ delivers orchestration capabilities to manage and track remediation, ticketing, and enforcement workflows based on integrations with IT, security, and SOC tools. Patches can be applied, segmentation rules can be created on the fly, and even lockdown procedures implemented automatically in response to threats, as well as providing alternative remediation for environments where changes and patches cannot be made.
• Dashboards and Reports  – Armis Centrix™ offers detailed and high-level dashboards and reports that are easily tailored for all audiences, to reflect the attack surface status in real-time and monitor the effectiveness of the ongoing exposure management program.

We invite you to download a complimentary copy of the Gartner report Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024: Continuous Threat Exposure Management.

To experience Armis Centrix™, check out the free trial or request a custom demo.

Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024, Continuous Threat Exposure Management, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Pete Shoard

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