Threat Exposure Validation Impact Report 2025
The state of CTEM and key insights and trends on automation and AI, cloud exposure validation and the optimization of threat prevention and detection.
Find out why 1,000 CISOs, SecOps practitioners, and red and blue teamers across the globe believe threat exposure validation is critical to achieving a strong security posture in 2025 and beyond.
INSIGHT #1
Threat Exposure Validation Is a Must-Have in 2025
of security leaders surveyed agree that threat exposure validation is absolutely essential in 2025.
Organizations that run exposure processes at least once per month have experienced a 20% reduction in breaches.
Organizations are deploying exposure validation in one or more areas, including:
Cloud Security - 53%
Security Controls - 49%
Response - 36%
Threats - 34%
Key benefits of exposure validation:
Improved mean time to detection
Increased threat resilience against the latest immediate threats
Continuous validation and tuning of security controls
INSIGHT #2
Automation and AI are Essential to Continuous Exposure Validation
of security leaders have already begun to implement AI into exposure validation processes.
more threats can be tested with automated security validation compared to manual security testing methods.
of respondents who use automated security control validation say they have observed significant positive changes in their security metrics (e.g. a decrease in breaches or associated costs).
agree that this year they want their organization to take an innovative approach to leveraging AI adoption for security.
On average, it takes organizations who have implemented AI into their exposure validation process 24 fewer hours to test their defenses against newly identified cyber threats.
INSIGHT #3
Organizations are Struggling to Identify and Remediate Cloud Exposures
of security leaders agree their organization lacks the ability to identify and remediate exposures in their cloud environments.
of organizations run exposure validation in their cloud environment on a daily basis.
say it can take up to 24 hours to validate cloud exposures.
INSIGHT #4
Multiple Methods of Security Validation are Already in Play – and Working
say testing the threat prevention and detection capabilities of their security controls is important.
of respondents who use automated security control validation and measure cyber program effectiveness have seen a positive impact since implementation.
Multiple security validation methods are already being deployed:
