How Lean Security Teams Can Build Resilient Defenses

Most security teams face a staggering challenge. They’re tasked with protecting against the same advanced threats as any large enterprise, but often have a fraction of the budget, tools, and personnel. It’s not uncommon to hear these teams being told to “do more with less.” But still, the stakes couldn’t be higher. 

These organizations are expected to secure enterprise-level outcomes on limited resources, all while juggling compliance requirements, vendor justifications, and responding to emerging threats. The result? Security leaders spend more time firefighting than proactively reinforcing defenses. Ultimately, maximizing the people, processes, and platforms you already have can be the most effective path forward.

The reality of high expectations and finite resources

Security teams across small to mid-market organizations are often stretched thin. They handle executive-level reporting, compliance assessments, vendor management, and active threats, all while maintaining operational uptime. Yet, their headcount don’t often reflect their responsibilities. 

In a recent survey conducted by SANS, more than 63% of organizations described their security budgets as "less than sufficient," and nearly half (49%) cited a lack of skilled personnel as an ongoing challenge.

All these point to the reality that security teams are likely highly dependent on existing tools and headcount to tackle an increasing number of challenges. Maximizing those tools they already have (EDR, vulnerability management, identity, email security, and so on) has become essential.

While teams may own those advanced security tools, they can lack confidence in their coverage and efficacy. Questions like “Is our EDR fully deployed?” or “Are users consistently using multi-factor authentication (MFA)?” require chasing answers across consoles or untenable spreadsheets and complex Power BI dashboards. Without sufficient visibility into whether their security controls are functioning as intended, teams can go after problems that aren't there or miss the gaps that actually exist.

How to maximize the security tools you already have

Continuous control monitoring

Continuous control monitoring aims to answer that very question. Effectively, lean team teams need to understand that the foundational security practices are in place. Ongoing monitoring ensures that critical security measures are deployed, configured, and operational.

While periodic, point-in-time audits can provide a laundry list of adjustments that need to be made, they are highly reactive and difficult to prioritize. Ongoing visibility across your environment can inform the technical and strategic priorities to focus the efforts of a lean security team. For example, continuous monitoring helps you answer critical questions like: 

• Is your EDR solution installed and active on every endpoint?
• Are all users protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA)?
• Are your vulnerability scans up to date?

Instead of only assessing security gaps when an audit is due or following an incident, this proactive approach helps small teams stay a step ahead. 

Continuous threat exposure management

When an attacker hits a rival or nearby organization, the question from leaders is typically, "Are we protected?"

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) aims to make this question easier for security teams to answer. These ongoing assessments evaluate whether current defenses and tools are enough to handle real-world threats. In contrast to traditional adversary emulation or breach scenarios, continuous exposure management helps you regularly visualize the state of your environment as it applies to relevant threat intelligence. Leveraging the insights provided by ongoing control monitoring and layering on their threat intelligence, teams can effectively: 

• Scope: Define the organization's critical assets, potential threats, and security priorities to establish a clear focus for continuous assessments
• Discover: Identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and weaknesses in the environment that adversaries could exploit
• Prioritize: Rank identified risks based on their potential impact and likelihood, ensuring resources are focused on the most critical vulnerabilities
• Validate: Test and simulate threat scenarios to ensure defenses are effective against prioritized risks
• Mitigate: Implement corrective actions and security improvements to address identified vulnerabilities and improve overall resilience

By replacing static, point-in-time reviews with ongoing validation, these methods make sure you’re operating with confidence and efficiency, even when resources are tight.

Operationalizing these methodologies doesn't have to be a challenge

Of course, strategies like these come with their own hurdles. While continuous control monitoring and exposure management are the right solutions in theory, implementing them in practice can be daunting for small teams.  

• Too many tools, too little time: Most organizations rely on multiple consoles (EDR, vulnerability management, IAM, etc.), which leads to constant context switching and inefficient workflows
• Manual effort overload: Without automation, this validation and exposure process often involves spreadsheets and manual cross-referencing with frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, which is time-consuming and error-prone
• Lack of dedicated personnel: Full-time personnel for tooling validation are a rare luxury for smaller organizations. Instead, the work gets squeezed into already overburdened schedules

What we have built at Prelude is designed to enable continuous control monitoring and exposure management without adding extra overhead for security teams. By integrating into the tools you already use, we provide visibility into what's missing, misconfigured, or vulnerable and map threat intelligence against your environment to fully evaluate your security posture.

This post was originally published on The Register.