The cloud security industry has long been defined by an ever-expanding alphabet soup of point solutions—CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management), CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platform), KSPM (Kubernetes Security Posture Management), DSPM (Data Security Posture Management), ASPM (Application Security Posture Management), not to mention compliance tools, malware detection, and vulnerability management.
Each acronym emerged to address a particular slice of the problem. The unintended result? Security teams juggle multiple consoles, reconcile fragmented data, and struggle to connect the dots across attack surfaces.
Now, a new term is rising—CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management). Unlike point products, CTEM is not just another category; it’s a recognition that the old siloed approach doesn’t work. To secure modern, dynamic cloud environments, organizations need to continuously measure, understand, and reduce their exposure across the entire attack surface.
While analysts and vendors are only now rallying around CTEM, Uptycs has been advocating for—and delivering on—the platform approach for years.
When best-of-breed was the mantra, Uptycs was building a unified security analytics platform from the ground up. The architecture was designed for scale, speed, and correlation—not bolted together through acquisitions or integrations after the fact. It’s the reason why Uptycs customers can operate with clarity where others are still reconciling dashboards.
Uptycs ingests data from diverse sources—cloud control planes, workloads, endpoints, identities, containers, and SaaS apps—and normalizes it at the source. This eliminates the complexity of working with heterogeneous schemas and prepares the data for immediate analysis.
Unlike point tools that create silos of telemetry, Uptycs stores all data in a single relational schema. With well-structured, human-readable column names, security teams can query and join data across diverse sources with ease.
This means that malicious activity can be correlated as it hops from one surface to another—an IAM misconfiguration exploited in the cloud, leading to lateral movement in workloads, culminating in data exfiltration from storage. With one schema, this full attack chain is visible.
At the heart of the Uptycs platform is a built-in data lake optimized for security telemetry. Data flows in, is enriched, and can be correlated in real time—allowing for alerting on misconfigurations or malicious activity within seconds.
Speed matters. A delayed detection is often the difference between a thwarted attack and a breach.
Threat actors don’t work on neat timelines. With Uptycs, historical telemetry is retained and searchable, enabling retrospective hunting, anomaly detection, and forensics. This is critical for compliance, post-incident analysis, and proactive threat hunting.
When Gartner talks about CTEM, they outline a cycle: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. Uptycs is uniquely suited to support every phase of that cycle:
In other words, Uptycs doesn’t just check the CTEM box—it operationalizes it.
Industry analysts have noticed the shift. Just a few years ago, the dominant narrative was “best-of-breed.” Today, even highly successful vendors such as Wiz are repositioning around platform approaches. This isn’t coincidence—it’s necessity.
As environments scale and attack surfaces multiply, stitching together siloed tools is unsustainable. Customers need integrated visibility, correlation, and actionability. Uptycs has been building for this future from the beginning.
Cloud security will no doubt continue to spawn new acronyms. But the measure of success isn’t how many categories you can cover—it’s whether you can continuously manage and reduce threat exposure in real-world environments.
That’s what CTEM represents. And that’s what Uptycs has been enabling all along.