It’s increasingly evident that the reactive approach to cybersecurity falls short, serving primarily as damage control rather than a reliable defense strategy. The reactive cybersecurity strategy observes limitations such as delayed detection and response, failure to comply with current regulations, inability to foresee evolving threats, and failure to prepare for complex attacks. Furthermore, organizations deploying reactive measures can face financial loss, customer churn, and reputational damage. To stay a step ahead of threats, forward-looking organizations are shifting from reactive to proactive cybersecurity strategies, identifying and mitigating cyber risks before getting exploited by adversaries.
Critical challenges in managing security posture
According to IBM X-Force analysis, nearly 98% of identified vulnerabilities are false positives or not exploitable, meaning traditional vulnerability scanning often leads to alert fatigue and wasted effort. Only 2% of vulnerabilities typically represent real, actionable threats, which highlights the need for risk-based vulnerability management that prioritizes vulnerabilities based on exploitability, asset value, and real-world threat context.
Expanding attack surface
The digital transformation embraced by organizations across sectors and sizes has significantly expanded the attack surface driven by multi and hybrid cloud adoption, work culture, and SaaS applications.
Lack of visibility
According to a Report by IDC, organizations globally report that they can “see” or monitor only 66% of their IT environments, leaving several blind spots, including those in the cloud. With this lack of visibility, organizations fail to understand their external attack surface and internal security weaknesses.
Challenge of prioritization
Security teams face ongoing challenges of prioritizing risks, with traditional vulnerability management platforms generating numerous vulnerabilities that may not be threatening. Teams are overwhelmed to prioritize threats, exposing organizations to potentially deadly attacks.
Adversarial AI
The AI attacks involve malicious actors intentionally attempting to change the architecture of AI systems, causing significant harm. They leverage automation and AI to identify and exploit vulnerabilities at a faster rate than traditional assessments can keep up.
To address these challenges, Microsoft has introduced a proactive, exposure-centric security approach through Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), bringing insights in one place from ITDR, MDVM, unified XDR, 3rd part TVMs such as Tenable, Rapid 7, WIZ, Qualys,
Service Now CMDB, EASM, and many more empower security teams to identify, prioritize, and mitigate risks before attackers can exploit them.
Microsoft’s CTEM enables Security Teams to Stay Ahead
CTEM is a proactive 5-stage security framework or program designed to continuously assess, validate, and remediate risks across an organization’s attack surface.
Scoping
In this first stage, it is crucial to have clarity about the assets and attack surfaces and the importance of assets to the organization. Decision makers from all business units should provide input to define the scope while agreeing on the plan of action.
Discovery
After scoping is the discovery stage, where relevant tools are leveraged to identify each asset’s potential exposure and associated risk. All potential exposures, like the active directory, identity, and configuration risks across endpoints, are discovered.
Prioritization
In this stage, all exposures, vulnerabilities, identities, and misconfigurations are analyzed by leveraging threat intelligence, exploitability data, and business impact analysis, enabling teams to focus on the critical assets’ most urgent risks.
Validation
This step involves simulating attack scenarios and conducting security posture assessments to confirm exposure risks and ensure accuracy. According to Gartner, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Tools enable organizations to better understand security posture vulnerabilities.
Mobilization
This stage closes the loop, ensuring that both IT and Security team members follow their responsibilities and take proactive measures like patching and isolating vulnerable assets, thereby remediating vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
Microsoft’s CTEM capabilities are integrated within Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Security Exposure Management. This enables Automated risk detection, Contextual prioritization, Seamless remediation workflows, and Simulation and validation.
Security Exposure Management enables security teams to continuously discover, inventory, and contextualize the organization’s attack surface. By analyzing attack paths and prioritizing weaknesses from an attacker’s perspective, it shifts away from traditional, siloed approaches. This provides unified exposure insights, helping organizations understand their security posture and strategically reduce risk.
Eliminating Blind Spots with Microsoft’s EASM
With organizations expanding, their external attack surface, which includes internet-facing assets such as web servers, web applications, and cloud assets, grows proportionally and becomes a potential entry point for attackers. By leveraging Microsoft’s External Attack Surface Management (EASM), organizations can continuously monitor their external digital footprint and receive alerts about potential exposures or vulnerabilities.
Microsoft’s EASM Solution benefits include comprehensive discovery of publicly exposed assets and scanning for new exposures in real time to eliminate blind spots. Other advantages include mapping and analyzing attack paths and prioritizing remediation based on exploitability, threat intelligence, and business impact. The Solution leverages AI-driven risk scoring to determine the highest-risk posing vulnerabilities.
It can be seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Defender and Sentinel for end-to-end security monitoring and automated response workflows while establishing a robust security posture that keeps threat actors at bay. Defenders must adopt an attacker’s mindset, while defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs. By doing so, teams can better identify and prioritize vulnerabilities to minimize the attack surface effectively.
The Road Ahead for Proactive Security with Microsoft’s CTEM and EASM
In today’s evolving security landscape, Microsoft’s integrated CTEM and EASM approach empowers organizations to shift from point-in-time security assessments to continuous security validation, ensuring ongoing protection. Security teams can prioritize risks more effectively using AI-driven insights and detailed attack path mapping, allowing them to focus on what matters most. Furthermore, automated remediation capabilities help organizations stay ahead of evolving threats, reducing response times and strengthening overall cyber resilience. With Microsoft’s CTEM and EASM, security teams can shift left on security, identify risks before they become incidents, and build a resilient cybersecurity posture that outpaces adversaries.
By- Vikas Chaturvedi, Principal Architect – Microsoft Cybersecurity, Inspira Enterprise
About The Author
