Cyber security has often evolved at the edges of an organisation's technology infrastructure, shaped more by urgency than by design. A persistent skills gap, combined with this pressure to respond quickly to threats and breaches, has led many companies to rely heavily on security tooling.
These security tools are often deployed independently and in a rush, rather than being deployed as part of a cohesive, strategic architecture. Compounding the issue, many of the solutions these technologies provide are not standardised across the industry, resulting in overlapping functionality, redundant subscriptions and limited interoperability. The outcome is a fragmented security environment that lacks integration and fails to provide a unified view of the organisation's threat landscape.
Many companies have tool sets that cover the foundational layers. They have endpoint detection and response (EDR) to combat ransomware, identity and access management (IAM) and MFA to prevent account compromise and e-mail security to detect and block phishing attacks. However, the insights that can be gathered from these tools are often limited. Resources are focused on managing vendor relationships and creating manual stop-gap solutions for siloed data instead of the strategic optimisation of the capabilities these tools can provide.
"This limited, fragmented visibility means that you don't know what you don't know," says Stephan Krynauw, CTO of Snode. "Critical anomalies are lost in the volume of uncorrelated data. It creates blind spots and makes decision-making slower and less confident. This is a critical disadvantage when you're fighting cyber criminals who have access to AI-enabled tools and other nascent technologies we are only beginning to think about."
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a continuous, risk-based cyber security framework developed by Gartner that helps organisations identify, prioritise, validate and remediate threats across their entire attack surface. It focuses on an organisation's exposure rather than a specific attack vector, taking into account the entire ambit of vulnerabilities from people to technology. This emphasis on complete visibility provides decision-makers with the clarity, prioritisation and context they need to stay ahead of rapidly evolving threats. This is particularly relevant as adversaries adopt generative AI to streamline reconnaissance, craft adaptive phishing payloads and accelerate malware development, a trend highlighted by Google in early 2025.
But most businesses aren't ready. CTEM requires a level of integration, data correlation and visibility that many IT and security teams currently lack. The tool buying spree was inevitable, but what was lost in the rush was intentional design.
"Applying the CTEM framework to your environment enables benefits far beyond what most organisations are seeing from their tooling and vendor relationships today. But it requires engineering discipline," explains Krynauw. "It means integrating security from the ground up, not bolting it on after the fact. That's how you get from insight to action, from detection to resilience. In order to continuously improve your threat exposure, a key question that has to be answered for each minor breach, compromise, malware event and/or phishing case is: "How?” How did this event transpire, and how do we plug this gap? If the data is readily available, this is a quick and easy question to answer; if not, it is almost impossible."
Krynauw has embedded this philosophy into the design of Snode Guardian, the company's award-winning platform. The platform is built on a distributed architecture that aligns with customer environments. This reduces latency and improves responsiveness by processing data closer to where it's generated. The result is faster insights and more efficient threat detection at the network's edge.
The Snode Guardian platform integrates a wide range of security tools, enabling organisations to view and correlate relevant information in real-time. By normalising logs from these tools, Snode breaks down data silos and enables a unified, contextual view across the environment. This approach allows for faster, more informed decisions based on correlated signals rather than isolated alerts.
"When security tools are monitored independently, their insights do not talk to each other, which puts the onus on the security analyst to perform the time-consuming effort to correlate. But when we normalise data, the platform becomes a source of truth. Now we can see how a phishing attempt correlates with a failed login, and how a rogue endpoint initiated the request in real-time," says Krynauw.
Snode Guardian surfaces the right threats at the right time, enabling faster and smarter decisions. Importantly, the platform is designed to operate independently or as a managed service, giving organisations flexibility in how they scale their security functions. And while it delivers sophisticated capabilities, it avoids the trap of becoming another point solution. It functions as a real-time data integration layer, enabling interoperability across the entire security stack.
"I see cyber security as an engineering challenge and enable my team to do the same," says Krynauw. "By building for cross-domain correlation and distributed analysis, we consolidate signals and increase clarity. Cyber security leaders no longer need to bridge the information gap created by disparate tooling with educated guesses; they have the data to make the right decision every time."
Share