There is a clear gap emerging between organizations, according to a recent 2026 market intelligence study of 128 enterprise security decision-makers (found here). This gap is entirely related to a single framework decision and has nothing to do with industry or budget size. Businesses that use Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) show superior threat awareness across all metrics, a 23-point increase in solution adoption, and a 50% improvement in attack surface visibility.

16% of those who have adopted it are withdrawing. The 84% who haven't are lagging behind. The Divide's Demographics A senior cohort was surveyed for the study; 85% of respondents are managers or higher, and they represent companies with 66% of 5,000 or more employees in the retail, healthcare, and financial sectors.

It is hard to overlook a pattern that shows up when organizations compare themselves side by side in terms of attack surface size, visibility, tooling, and results: traditional security approaches stop scaling at a certain level of complexity. The clear conclusion from the peer benchmarks is that organizations can depend on manual oversight and periodic controls below a certain exposure level. Those models are no longer valid above it.

The question of whether CTEM is useful for security leaders working in high-complexity environments has been replaced by the question of whether their current strategy can actually function without it. The complete market research can be downloaded here.