IT and security teams have been pushed for years: just patch faster. Automate remediation. Chip away at that vulnerability backlog (and do it quickly).
But speed isn’t the only problem, context matters too. It’s critical to align remediation to business risk and operational capacity.
Patching everything is impossible. Many exposures can’t be remediated without risk, downtime, and slow cross-functional coordination. And even when you can patch, there’s no guarantee it fully closes the gap. The result is an endless loop: find a vulnerability, deploy a patch, hope it works, repeat. Rarely is there time to stop and ask if there’s a smarter way.
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) breaks that loop. It reframes the goal from “patch everything” to “reduce real risk.” Instead of vulnerability counts and patch velocity, business risk, control coverage, and threat validation are the guiding principles. That’s where detection engineering steps in. Because when patching isn’t an option (or isn’t enough), the right detection can still close the gap.
In this post we’ll dig into the CTEM process, explain why detection engineering deserves a seat at the table, and outline how to embed detection at every phase of the CTEM lifecycle.
From Reactive to Continuous: A Quick CTEM Primer
Gartner introduced CTEM in 2022 in response to shortcomings with vulnerability management (VM) approaches. Traditional VM workflows focus on reporting vulnerabilities and managing patches but fail to incorporate operational context and business priorities. The result? Lots of busy work, but limited impact on actual risk.
CTEM is an evolution to a more holistic, proactive strategy. Organizations shift from periodic patching workflows to continuous efforts to assess relevant threats, validate what attackers can actually exploit, and prioritize remediations based on business risk. The CTEM framework focuses on a 5-step lifecycle: scoping of business and security objectives, discovery of relevant assets and attack surfaces, prioritization of high-impact remediation workflows, validation of the effectiveness of security controls, and mobilization of cross-functional teams.
Effective CTEM programs require the orchestration of patching vulnerabilities, hardening systems, filling gaps in asset coverage, maintaining effective IT and security policies, and much more. All of this hinges on cross-functional collaboration and alignment. The potential benefits make the added effort worth the while: Gartner predicts a two-thirds reduction in breaches for organizations that evolve beyond siloed vulnerability management practices to a broader CTEM program.
Reframing (and Reinforcing) Detection Engineering’s Role in CTEM
So what does CTEM have to do with detection engineering and SIEM processes? The answer lies partly in compensating controls, and partly in the overarching theme of cross-functional collaboration between teams responsible for prevention and detection controls.
Detections as Compensating Controls
How to remediate an exposure depends on the context surrounding the exposure, the controls available to mitigate it, and the resources available to implement those controls. Some remediations are too complex, resource-intensive, and risky to immediately implement for critical exposure, patches in particular. Gartner points out the inherent risks:
“Many organizations have experienced outages attributed to patches not working as intended. These outages are often high profile, generating reputational damage as well as lost revenue.” – “We’re Not Patching Our Way Out of Vulnerability Exposure,” Gartner Research
Compensating controls provide alternatives when patching and system hardening aren’t possible. For example, if an exposed cloud storage bucket can’t be immediately reconfigured, its log data can help detect access attempts from anomalous locations and unknown entities. That makes SIEM rules a crucial component to consider when evaluating potential remediation paths.And these kinds of remediation tradeoff decisions are only possible when IT, infrastructure, security architecture, and detection engineering frequently collaborate and maintain alignment.
Collaboration = Enhanced Threat Evaluation & Incident Response
You might be thinking “Getting involved in a big, continuous project? Nice thought, but too complex and time-intensive.” Take a beat and consider how perpetual SOC challenges could be solved for good, outside of the SOC. For example, implementing enterprise-wide multi-factor authentication processes, enforced by SSO and IAM policy governance, could save the SOC from endlessly toiling over rules that detect phishing techniques and other identity-based attacks.
With the continuation of the positive trends outlined in our 2025 State of SIEM Detection Risk Report–fewer broken SIEM rules, higher quality detections that require less manual tuning– more strategic projects like CTEM are within reach. And the dividends can be immense. In fact, Gartner predicts that organizations that enrich their SOC data with exposure information will enhance threat evaluation and accelerate incident response, reducing the frequency and impact of cyberattacks by 50%.
How to Embed Detection Engineering into CTEM Programs
So now you’re on board with detection having a seat at the CTEM table. How do you actually make it happen? CTEM is still an emerging process, so embedding detection engineering teams into CTEM programs early on will set a tone of collaboration. Staying closely involved throughout the process will reinforce the value of detection to the broader security team and leadership.
Below is an overview of the 5 stages of the CTEM cycle, with guidance on how threat detection teams can play a key role each step along the way.
Scoping
In the first stage of CTEM, stakeholders discuss the organization’s most significant business reputational risks and set key priorities. It is typically completed through a Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) lens, but it’s a perfect opportunity for threat detection leadership to get involved early, set a collaborative tone, and assert detection’s role in the broader program.
Discovery
The second stage involves discovering relevant attack surfaces, assets and potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other exposure risks. During this step, the detection engineering team can give the broader project team visibility into how current SIEM rules can identify threats to exposed assets, and whether there are significant coverage gaps.
Prioritization
This stage involves prioritizing exposures based on their potential impact to the business and likelihood of exploitation. Collaboration between detection engineering, security architecture, vulnerability management, IT, infrastructure, and leadership is crucial. Different functions own subsets of relevant security controls, with varying levels of complexity and effort to implement and maintain. As such, this step requires rigorous discussions of controls across hardening, patching, and detections. It’s also where you identify compensating controls that provide the most efficient path forward. Once it’s clear where detections will address key exposures, detection engineers can focus on refining and expanding relevant log sources and SIEM rules.
Validation
This stage focuses on validating whether security controls actually mitigate priority exposures. For detection engineering teams, it’s an opportunity to collaborate with the broader CTEM project team to simulate attacks and test whether SIEM rules trigger expected alerts. The results from breach attack simulations help identify which detections require further tuning, and where new detection rules are needed to cover unexpected coverage gaps.
Mobilization
This stage focuses on mobilizing the cross-functional team to take action on the gaps identified in the validation stage. It involves a range of stakeholders implementing tactical improvements across IT and security to streamline processes, refine remediation workflows and fix other issues to mitigate priority exposures. For detection engineering, this is where issues with existing rules and alert workflows are resolved, new detection rules are scoped and prioritized, and log ingestion processes are refined–effectively restarting the iterative CTEM lifecycle.
From Signal to Safeguard: Detection as Mitigation
CTEM is an evolution in how to think about risk, forcing organizations to look beyond patch counts and ticket queues. Instead the focus should be: What exposures actually matter, and how are we addressing them in practice?
That’s where detection engineering earns its place. Not as an afterthought once remediation fails, but as a first-class strategy alongside patching, hardening, and policy enforcement. Well-built detections give teams the flexibility to respond when traditional controls aren’t feasible, without sacrificing coverage or control.
It’s time to stop treating detections as passive alerts and start treating them as active risk mitigations. Because with CTEM, the goal isn’t just fewer exposures. It’s smarter responses. More resilience. And detections that don’t just signal risk but help solve it.
One well-crafted detection won’t just fill the gap. It might be the reason the gap never turns into a breach.