A new 2026 market intelligence survey of 128 enterprise security decision makers (available here) reveals a clear chasm forming between organizations. It has nothing to do with budget size or industry and everything to do with deciding on one framework. Organizations that implement Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) see a 50% increase in attack surface visibility, a 23-point increase in solution adoption, and superior threat awareness across all dimensions measured. 16% of those who introduced it have withdrawn it. The 84% who have not received it are falling behind.
Divided demographics
The survey surveyed a senior demographic, with 85% of respondents at manager level or above, and 66% representing organizations employing 5,000 or more people across the financial, healthcare, and retail industries.
Download the entire study here →
What is CTEM?
For those unfamiliar, CTEM requires a shift from “patching everything after the fact” to “continually discovering, validating, and prioritizing risk exposures that can actually harm the business.” This is currently being widely discussed in the cybersecurity space as the next evolution in exposure/risk management, and a new report confirms Gartner’s view that companies that adopt it consistently demonstrate stronger security outcomes than those that don’t.
Awareness is high. Adoption is rare.
One surprising discovery. It seems like the problem is not in the perception, but in the implementation. 87% of security leaders recognize the importance of CTEM, but only 16% translate this into actual operations. So if you’ve heard of it, why don’t you use it?
The gap between awareness and implementation reveals the central dilemma of modern security. It’s a matter of which one you prioritize. Security leaders conceptually understand CTEM, but struggle to sell its benefits in the face of organizational inertia, competing priorities, and budget constraints that force impossible tradeoffs. The challenge of gaining executive buy-in is one of the reasons we created this report, to provide statistics that make the business case impossible to ignore.
Complexity is the new multiplier
For example: Beyond a certain threshold, all additional integrations, scripts, and manual tracking of dependencies will fail, blurring ownership and increasing blind spots. This research reveals that attack surface complexity is more than just a management challenge. It’s a direct risk multiplier.
You can clearly see this in the graph below. The attack rate increases linearly from 5% (0-10 domains) to 18% (51-100 domains), and increases sharply after 100 domains.
This sudden increase is being driven by the “visibility gap,” the disconnect between the assets companies are responsible for monitoring and those they are aware of. Each addition of a domain can add dozens of connected assets, and if that number exceeds 100, it can result in thousands of additional scripts, each a potential attack vector. Traditional snapshot security can’t log and monitor them all. Only a CTEM-driven program can provide the monitoring to continually identify and verify dark assets hiding in this visibility gap before attackers do.
Why is this important now?
Security leaders currently face a “perfect storm” of demands. With 91% of CISOs reporting an increase in third-party incidents, the average cost of a breach rising to $4.44 million, and PCI DSS 4.0.1 bringing greater scrutiny and the ever-present fear of penalties. With this in mind, this report leaves no choice but to conclude that attack surface management has become a problem not only in the server room but also in the boardroom, and that C-suite readers are left with no choice but to conclude that continuing to rely on manual monitoring and regular management to manage such a complex and high-stakes challenge is self-defeating.
One of the clearest signals in this study comes from peer benchmarking data. As organizations compare attack surface size, visibility, tools, and outcomes side-by-side, patterns emerge that cannot be ignored. This means that beyond a certain level of complexity, traditional security approaches no longer scale.
The benefits of peer benchmarking are clear. Below a certain level of exposure, organizations can rely on regular management and manual monitoring. Beyond that, those models no longer hold. For security leaders operating in highly complex environments, the question is no longer whether CTEM is worth it, but whether current approaches can realistically scale without CTEM.
Download the complete market study here.
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