There are 10 benefits of vulnerability management including:
- Cost-effectiveness.
- Maturing your security program.
- Rapidly responding to threats.
- Gaining operational efficiencies.
- Enhancing visibility and reporting.
- Maintaining compliance requirements.
- Integrating with the patching program.
- Helping to burn down backlogs.
- Establishing trust with clients.
- Automating scanning and patching.
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Cyber attacks have skyrocketed in recent years due to an attack surface expansion.
Many organizations are dependent on interconnected technologies, this surface includes a higher volume of internet-connected devices and increased integration of networks and systems.
New devices typically have default settings and credentials, but many people fail to change them. Armed with the same default login and password, a threat actor looking to exploit a device could easily gain access.
This means cybercriminals can steal your data, lock you out of your device, invade your privacy, and even cause physical harm when in control of IoT and operational technology (OT) machinery.
But it’s not always fresh out-of-the-box items. Vulnerabilities can become exposed with existing technology.
After reading this article you will be able to see what makes vulnerability management effective and how to communicate these benefits to stakeholders.
What Is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability Management is a management process designed to proactively identify, classify, remediate, and mitigate vulnerabilities in an IT infrastructure to reduce overall risk to an organization. It’s an important feature of a cybersecurity strategy and helps to drive the first lines of defense.
The goal of an effective vulnerability management program is to understand the threat landscape to reduce attack surface and mitigate risk.
This is achieved with cross-functional teams working on projects and utilizing tools to gain greater insights for remediation.
The Vulnerability Management Lifecycle
The vulnerability management lifecycle is designed as a continuous management process for an organization to actively address vulnerabilities to their systems through discovery, prioritization, assessment, action, re-assessment, and improvement.
- Discovery – Discover and target the assets that are to be included in the vulnerability assessment.
- Prioritize – Assign a value to each asset based on its impact or criticality to business operations.
- Assess – Conduct the vulnerability scan based on the asset discovery. Create reports to ensure each asset is properly scanned and provides results.
- Act – Review the vulnerability report with appropriate stakeholders. Establish a strategy for remediation or acceptance of risk.
- Reassess – Ensure threats are eliminated and prove mitigation efforts are actually working.
- Improve – Routinely review the state of your vulnerability program. Look for ways to improve and protect your network against evolving threats.
Vulnerability Management Vs Vulnerability Assessment
A vulnerability assessment is part of the vulnerability management lifecycle.
The assessment is the step of identifying vulnerabilities and understanding what risk they may pose to your organization.
The vulnerability management lifecycle is designed to take that assessment and create projects and prioritization around assessing and remediating those vulnerabilities.
Why Vulnerability Management Is Important
From neglected software security updates to misconfigurations to weak identity and access management, and other instances, there is an entire ecosystem ripe with weaknesses.
These vulnerability factors increase the overall risk to an organization.
Attackers can steal data and damage critical systems, which opens the door to potential legal, financial, and public relations challenges.
Many organizations suffer colossal payouts every year due to ransomware and the fallout associated. They lose millions over a vulnerability that was not properly managed.
To avoid this outcome, organizations have begun to take a proactive approach to their vulnerability management.
Some go as far as to implement a continuous process for managing and remediating these threats.
Benefits Of Vulnerability Management
1. Is Cost-effective
Certainly, one of the top benefits to any organization is cost-effectiveness, and vulnerability management possesses multiple cost-saving advantages.
It eliminates ad hoc patching which can lead to missed patches and compound costs.
It also reduces technical debt by helping the organization set focus and prioritization around assets that present the highest risk if exploited.
Plain and simple, vulnerability management helps to bring structure and precision to an organization’s security posture.
This bolsters its justification to stakeholders who will then be more likely to support vulnerability initiatives.
2. Matures Your Security Program
Growth is an important component of any organization, but especially in and around its
cybersecurity program.
Vulnerability management enhances the overall security posture of your organization by recognizing key assets and where to prioritize efforts to reduce risk.
Working together with other security teams helps prevent access and data exploitation by threat actors.
However, not all risks are due to outward attacks. Vulnerability management also achieves specific goals for security frameworks or compliance requirements.
Related Content: How To Conduct A Security Risk Assessment
3. Quickly Respond To Threats
For instance, the Log4j vulnerability was identified a day before Thanksgiving in 2021, sending all organizations on high alert.
Vulnerability management helps to move organizations from a reactive response to a proactive one.
Having a continuous patch management process in place ensures immediate identification, and prioritization, and has the resources to remediate critical vulnerabilities.
In doing so it lays the groundwork for a quicker and more effective response to threats that emerge. Bad guys don’t sleep or take holidays! New vulnerabilities are found daily when we least expect it.
4. Gain Operational Efficiencies
Keeping teams and systems aligned to project goals and outcomes is important – especially when involving highly sensitive security for an organization.
To maintain alignment, vulnerability management aims to define the process for identifying vulnerabilities and remediating them.
It also has the potential to reduce manual workflows and provide automation with continuous monitoring, alerting, and remediation solutions.
This not only adds to operational efficiency but has very much become a standard security practice.
5. Enhances Visibility And Reporting
As mentioned previously, when deploying a vulnerability assessment, vulnerability management helps to build a system of tracking and reporting.
Having visibility into a project explains the return on investment in security to stakeholders and can help to support other projects.
Vulnerability reporting also helps to uplift the team by providing actionable dashboards and trend reports to quickly measure the performance and state of the program.
In turn, these contextualized reports provide key metrics and indicators for senior management to make informed decisions on key initiatives.
6. Maintains Compliance Requirements
Effective vulnerability management will help to achieve regulatory requirements.
This can be done by reviewing and implementing compliances from various frameworks, such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).
PCI has a list of compliances that range from the more general, as in, “provide a patch audit report”, to the more specific, such as, “deploy patches on systems for both internal and external applications only after testing them in separate test environments”.
A robust set of patch management policies and procedures is required for a healthcare organization to meet HIPAA compliance.
This includes proper inventory management, testing, documentation, and configurations around automatic software updates, unmanaged hosts, firmware, and more.
7. Integrates With Patching Program
It’s common within an organization structure for a vulnerability management team to function under the ownership of IT or security.
Regardless of where your team is placed, both IT and security teams need to work together to achieve the goal of patching vulnerable systems.
Having open communication and regular cadences will help with integration of priorities and projects.
8. Helps Burn Down Backlogs
Planning to burn down existing vulnerabilities is much easier to strategize and execute than patching new vulnerabilities, and is often more important.
Not every organization operates the same way or has the same type of assets or users.
Because of this, many vulnerabilities that may pose a greater risk to one organization don’t necessarily pose the same level of risk to another.
A patching plan to reduce the backlog of vulnerable systems helps save time, organizes priorities, and can prevent unnecessary costs to low-level vulnerability remediation.
9. Build Trust With Clients
The rise of ransomware and supply chain attacks, like the Kaseya ransomware attack, has forced organizations to audit 3rd party vendors, forcing stakeholders to become more aware of the dangers of insecure systems.
Executive-level reporting and key metric indicators provide stakeholders and clients with visibility into the state of the program.
This is an important feature of modern business practice, where many stakeholders increasingly assess the risk of doing business based on an organization’s security posture.
Having the data and resources in place to report on the health of the organization adds credibility and heightens the chance of doing business.
Establishing security policies is a great first step if you’ve not already begun to build a cybersecurity program.
10. Automates Scanning And Patching
We touched on how automation improves operational efficiency, but it also has the opportunity to further reduce costs on headspace.
Instead of hiring employees to manually scan or patch a system, it makes more sense for them to analyze the results and prove to management for decision-making.
This relieves the burden of time-consuming tactical work and allows for better planning and strategy.
How PurpleSec Manages Vulnerabilities
Our biggest focus at PurpleSec is automation and AI enhancement.
The traditional ways of throwing resources and technology at it are tedious and time-consuming.
There are many great toolsets available nowadays, but you’re still relying on human involvement, which is extremely resource-intensive.
We take a large portion of repetitive tasks out of human hands and automate them. This allows the human resource time to validate the machine and help organize and report on the risk for the organization.
Talented security professionals are also extremely valuable and patching isn’t quite a glamorous job in itself.
By automating those tasks it enables your team to spend their time on more value-added work like building new processes or programs to further enhance your security efforts.
With our solution, we’ve built out a process for managing the automation of identifying, prioritizing, assigning risk to, and setting up all the patching processes and mitigation.
- We know the risk.
- We know the priority to patch.
- We can take action immediately.
It can take a few days to get our system to talk to your scanners, patch management systems, and ticketing systems.
Once set up, we can have our experts remediating and creating risk acceptance plans and mitigating those risks withing 48 hours.
There’s a quick setup period and highly configurable to work with your technology stack and business processes. As a result, your 14-30 day risk windows become a 2-5 day risk window.
Wrapping Up
Technology helps improve business processes and goals by creating a more efficient and productive work environment.
However, technology can also hinder an organization from reaching its goals if its critical business systems and applications are left unmanaged within the organization’s infrastructure.
Vulnerability management creates a healthier ecosystem by identifying and remediating vulnerabilities that may cause severe harm, resulting in legal, financial, and reputational consequences to your business operations.
By laying out its top 10 benefits, this article has shown the value vulnerability management brings to an organization.
You can now easily communicate and justify to stakeholders and project teams why this area of security is vital to reaching shared goals.
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