Gartner CTEM Report Guide

If you’ve searched for “the Gartner CTEM report,” you’ve probably found a dozen vendor landing pages, each offering a different one behind a form. That’s because there isn’t a single report. Gartner has published a series of research notes on continuous threat exposure management since 2022. Each one moves the framework forward, from defining the program, to mapping out how to adopt it, to evaluating the tools that support it.

This guide covers the key reports in order: when each was published, what it says, and who it’s most useful for.

The Original Report: Implement a CTEM Program (2022)

This is where CTEM started. Gartner’s Implement a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Program was written by Jeremy D’Hoinne, Pete Shoard and Mitchell Schneider and first published in July 2022. An updated version followed in October 2023.

The report introduced the five-stage cycle that every CTEM program now uses: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. It also made the prediction that most CTEM content still quotes: by 2026, organizations that prioritize security investments through a CTEM program will be “three times less likely to suffer from a breach.” 

Its core argument is that enterprises fail to reduce threat exposure through self-assessment because their approaches are unrealistic, siloed and tool-centric. Key findings include:

• Zero-day vulnerabilities are rarely the primary cause of a breach.
• Technology-centric attack surface and vulnerability self-assessment projects tend to produce reports that rarely get acted on, along with long lists of generic remediations.
• Testing attack feasibility through security posture validation improves score-based prioritization. 

The report’s recommendations set the direction for everything that followed. It advises designing a program around the wider set of exposures likely to affect business priorities, instead of simply inventorying vulnerabilities, and complementing existing vulnerability management with emerging areas such as attack surface management and security posture validation.

The Strategic Roadmaps (2023 and 2025)

Where the original report defined CTEM, the roadmaps lay out how to get there over several years.

The 2024 Strategic Roadmap for Managing Threat Exposure came first. Despite the “2024” in its title, it was published by Pete Shoard on 8 November 2023. It looks at how exposure management will evolve over the next three to five years, and at the inflection points leaders can use to reduce threat exposure risk and work more closely with adjacent teams. It warns that when a poorly governed program can’t accurately scope, discover, prioritize and validate issues, the business ends up accepting large amounts of unknown and unquantified risk.

The follow-up, Strategic Roadmap for Continuous Threat Exposure Management, was published on 26 August 2025, also by Pete Shoard. It gives CISOs a roadmap for moving from traditional technology vulnerability management to a broader, more dynamic CTEM program. Its headline prediction is that by 2028, more than half of threat exposure findings will result from nontechnical vulnerabilities, not technical flaws. Its key findings stress validation, broad business engagement and outcome-driven reporting.

The Practitioner Guides (2024 and 2025)

These two reports are less about long-term strategy and more about the practical work of building the program.

How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management was published on 8 November 2024 by Mitchell Schneider, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Jonathan Nunez and Craig Lawson. Its premise is that prioritized vulnerability lists aren’t enough to cover all exposures or produce actionable fixes, so security operations managers should build a CTEM program to scope and remediate exposures more effectively. It focuses on evolving the program teams already run into exposure management instead of starting over. It notes that vulnerability management remains a challenge for many organizations because it involves so many stakeholders across IT, and that adding business context such as asset value and impact of compromise can improve senior leadership engagement.

Use Continuous Threat Exposure Management to Reduce Cyberattacks was published on 16 July 2025 by Jonathan Nunez, Pete Shoard and Mitchell Schneider. It covers prioritizing threats by business impact instead of severity scores, validating that security controls work as intended, moving beyond tool-centric thinking, and maturing a CTEM initiative from inception to full operational maturity.

The Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms (2025)

As CTEM matured, Gartner began evaluating the tools that support it. The Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms was published on 10 November 2025 by Mitchell Schneider, Dhivya Poole and Jonathan Nunez, and it evaluates 20 vendors.

It’s the first Magic Quadrant for this market, and it replaces the earlier Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment. Gartner defines exposure assessment platforms as tools that discover, analyze and prioritize exposures, such as vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, unmanaged assets and misconfigurations, across external, internal, cloud and end-user attack surfaces.

The report also includes a prediction about workflows. By 2027, organizations that integrate exposure assessment data into IT and business workflows will see 30% less unplanned downtime from exploited vulnerabilities than those relying on isolated vulnerability management tools.

EAP is one of two CTEM-aligned categories. The other is adversarial exposure validation, and Gartner formally delineated both in 2024.

The Mythos-Era Research (2026)

Gartner’s 2026 research responds to AI models that can find vulnerabilities faster than ever.

Pivotal Moment: Capitalize on Mythos Hype to Fix Your Exposure and Vulnerability Management was published on 13 May 2026 by Dhivya Poole, Jonathan Nunez, Jeremy D’Hoinne and Mitchell Schneider. Vendor summaries of the report point to four recommended changes, ranging from validated attack paths to automated exposure reduction, and to a shift away from severity scores toward how long critical assets remain exploitable.

In August 2026, a second note followed: Post-Mythos Preemptive Security Offerings Set to Fuel Exposure Management Adoption. Its analysts, Marissa Schmidt, Neil MacDonald and Grace Keyes, argue that frontier reasoning models are accelerating vulnerability discovery and analysis faster than reactive, detect-and-respond security can keep up. Their prescription is to stop treating exposure management as a visibility and prioritization exercise and start treating it as an autonomous remediation engine. 

The Common Thread Across Every Report

Read in order, the reports tell a consistent story. Each one moves Gartner’s emphasis further from finding exposures and closer to fixing them.

The 2022 report argued that self-assessments produce reports nobody acts on. The roadmaps and practitioner guides added business context, validation and cross-team engagement. The 2025 Magic Quadrant tied results to integrating exposure data into IT and business workflows. The 2026 research describes the goal as remediation at machine speed.

Three themes appear in nearly every report:

• Business context over severity scores. Prioritization should reflect asset value and business impact, not CVSS alone.
• Validation. Confirming what’s actually exploitable is treated as essential, not optional.
• Action across teams. Visibility is the starting point. The outcome Gartner measures is reduced exposure, and that depends on getting fixes done across IT, development and cloud teams.

Which Gartner CTEM Report Should You Read?

The right report depends on where your program is today:

• Just starting with CTEM: Implement a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Program, the original framework and the clearest explanation of why CTEM exists.
• Evolving an existing VM program: How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, the most practical route from where most teams are now.
• Planning a multi-year strategy: Strategic Roadmap for Continuous Threat Exposure Management (2025), for the three-to-five-year view and the shift toward nontechnical exposures.
• Evaluating tools: Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms (2025), Gartner’s first vendor evaluation for this market.
• Responding to AI-driven threats: The 2026 Mythos-era research, for where Gartner expects exposure management to go next.

Most Gartner research is available only to Gartner clients, but many of these reports can be downloaded free through vendor reprint pages.