Cyber security organizations are inundated with security and vulnerability alerts, and few have the available resources to properly investigate, accurately prioritize and intelligently respond to true risk. Understanding which vulnerabilities to address, and in what order, is a key component of an effective risk management strategy but is only one step in the risk management lifecycle.
Security and IT teams also struggle to understand which activities have a positive impact on reducing their overall risk. Did updating Windows on your CEO’s laptop reduce risk more than properly configuring AWS S3 storing your customers’ sensitive customer data? Maybe, or maybe not. It depends on the details and your company’s risk tolerance. This is why we’ve introduced the Vulcan Security Posture Rating (SPR). Measuring the traditional risk average isn’t helpful. You need to be able to measure the true impact of your risk mitigation efforts to your business.
Cyber security posture based on your risk
While it is important to prioritize existing risk, understanding how vulnerability response activities impact your security posture is also a critical element of successful risk management. A traditional risk prioritization rating reflects the criticality of existing vulnerabilities but doesn’t adequately track how effectively your organization is reducing its overall risk. It focuses on the average risk of current vulnerabilities, so when a lower priority vulnerability is fixed your overall risk rating actually increases because it’s based on the average score of any remaining vulnerabilities.
The Vulcan SPR delivers a more qualitative understanding of your overall risk. Easily customized variables result in KPIs that show you how your incremental vulnerability response activities impact your security posture. It does this by calculating the risk threshold for different vulnerabilities by asset grouping.
As critical vulnerabilities are remediated, the SPR is automatically adjusted to show your new overall risk. Because it is calculated by intelligent asset groupings, when an asset’s vulnerabilities are remediated, the overall security posture improves. Vulcan Cyber is unique in helping you and your IT security teams track the efficacy and impact of different risk response activities on your security posture over time.
Vulcan SPR will be rolled out to all Vulcan Cyber customers in the next couple of weeks.
Join us at the next CyberRisk Summit
If you would like to learn more from the product team behind Vulcan SPR, make sure to join us at the next CyberRisk Summit. This virtual summit is free to attend and will include product demonstrations and real-world use cases from Vulcan Cyber customers. Register here.
