Your guide to control monitoring and exposure management with Prelude

90% of ransomware attacks start with an unmanaged device

Managing security and IT environments typically means the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of dozens of tools. Despite every attempt to secure every workstation, server, and user, many companies still have critical gaps in their ecosystems that leave them vulnerable to breaches.

Obtaining the visibility needed to evaluate whether security controls are operating as intended remains a persistent operational challenge. Implementing regular control monitoring, validation, and exposure management into your security practices can prove essential in justifying your investments, maintaining compliance, and ultimately protecting your business. 

This guide will unpack why continuous control monitoring, configuration, and validation matter and show you how to operationalize these practices, leveraging the Prelude platform.

Making the most of your existing security tools

The average security team is leveraging roughly 10 tools to secure their business. Document and track asset inventory, endpoint detection and response, email security, manage identities, and conduct vulnerability scans. The list goes on.

Each of those tools introduces a layer of protection, but they also integrate additional complexity into your environment. You invest heavily in them, you rely on them, but you don't always have the visibility into whether they're performing as expected. If you do, these are traditionally manual and time-consuming efforts.

The data lives across multiple consoles, cobbled together in complex Power BI dashboards, or point-in-time spreadsheets backed by multiple VLOOKUPs and a hopeful prayer. Regardless of how it's done (and there is a better way, more on that later), such exercises remain critical for many reasons.

01. Managing your threat exposure

Every gap in your coverage is an opportunity for attackers. Whether it’s a missing configuration, missing vulnerability scans, privileged users without MFA, or devices without EDR—weaknesses increase your exposure to threats. By prioritizing ongoing control monitoring, you can reduce blind spots as they occur, address gaps proactively, and minimize your organization’s attack surface.

In many cases, this process requires threat intelligence and an understanding of how your current tools and processes may be able to respond or mitigate this threat and serves to prioritize your ongoing technical and strategic efforts.

Let’s walk through a common scenario. You’ve received a threat report highlighting MITRE ATT&CK techniques like Process Injection (T1055.001) and Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001). The report looks thorough and urgent. But what do you do with it?

If you’re like most teams, the answer involves digging through EDR and AV dashboards, trying to decipher if your tools can detect or prevent those techniques, and if the settings are correctly configured to do so.

For instance:

• Does your EDR tool have coverage for T1055.001?
• Is the behavior detection engine even turned on?
• Are exclusion lists accidentally creating blind spots?
• Has a misconfigured policy neutered a critical detection?

Answering these questions and evaluating your security stack as you receive new threat intelligence is an entire process in of itself, but it provides visibility into whether your organization is at risk. When a rival organization is hit by a threat actor, your executives are likely to come asking if you're protected. Being able to quickly ascertain that answer and proactively address any gaps in your existing technologies is a critical benefit of control monitoring and validation.

02. Justifying your security investments

In a recent survey conducted by SANS, 47% of participants across security functions flagged budget as a top concern going into 2025. As security budgets tighten and access to talent becomes more limited, it’s more important than ever to ensure every dollar spent delivers maximum impact. Investing in tools like EDR platforms, email security, and vulnerability management solutions is only worthwhile if you have visibility into their deployment and performance.

You need to know that these tools are fully deployed across your environment—securing the users and devices you paid for. Further, visibility into the capabilities you're leveraging versus not, provides clarity into both the efficacy of that tool's ability to do its job, and whether you're maximizing your investment. Continuous control monitoring and validation are essential for proving the ROI of your security investments.

03. Maintaining your compliance posture

Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 mandate strong cybersecurity measures. However, staying compliant requires more than just having tools deployed; it requires proving their effectiveness. By validating your configurations and monitoring gaps, you ensure your organization meets compliance requirements and stays ahead of potential audits.

Many compliance frameworks and privacy standards have stringent provisions that drive the use of relevant tooling like EDR, antivirus, vulnerability management, and others to effectively satisfy an audit. Maintaining awareness and ease of access to data from those tools ultimately makes it easier for organizations to stay in compliance and reduce manual efforts when audits come around.

Consider, for example: