Vulnerability Scanning as the First Step to Risk Remediation

With all the vulnerability remediation suites and individual tools on the market, it can be hard to determine which features and components are essential, which features are merely “nice to have”, and which are a waste of resources. We’ve sorted through the myriad of products and came up with the following list of eight components that a vulnerability remediation solution must have. Take a moment and make sure yours has all of them.

The Eight Components of Effective Vulnerability Remediation

1. Asset inventory: The first step in securing your network is to have a complete inventory of its assets. As Eric Dosal put it, “If you have an unknown asset on the network, then you will have unpatched vulnerabilities from that asset.” Without a clear inventory of your assets, you’re left exposed via the blind spots in your network.
2. Vulnerability scanning: Through scanning, you’ll be able to identify the vulnerabilities in the network. It’s a crucial step in the vulnerability remediation process. However, even the best scans cannot do more than point to security threats or validate fixed vulnerabilities. Moreover, scans offer only a “snapshot” of the situation at a specific moment and not a continuous assessment of the risk posture of the environment.
3. Prioritization: Simply put, this is the bread and butter of vulnerability remediation. In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift in prioritization: instead of prioritizing threats according to CVSS scores, security practitioners are now focusing on the specific risk that vulnerabilities pose to their environment. With this approach, instead of relying on objective metrics, vulnerabilities are put into the context of the enterprise and are prioritized accordingly.
4. Vulnerability Remediation Intelligence: Incorporating a database of solutions for vulnerabilities that’ll recommend the most efficient solution would be a huge enhancement for any remediation process. These solutions may be derived from a variety of sources, including software vendors, non-vendor generated data and manually collected data. Incorporating a solution repository will save the organization the time and effort of searching manually for the right solution.
5. Remediation Orchestration. Contextual prioritization is a crucial first step, but it won’t suffice on its own. In order to improve the security posture of the enterprise, security teams must go one step further and remediate the vulnerabilities in their digital environment. Otherwise, they’re left exposed.
6. Remediation Automation: Automation has become an essential aspect of vulnerability remediation in today’s reality. With security teams fighting the flood of vulnerabilities, enterprises must make a shift in their approach to vulnerability remediation and adopt automation. There are simply too many vulnerabilities to attend manually. Automation will enable security teams to remediate the vulnerabilities in their digital environments at scale.
7. Reporting and Analytics: Security teams need to find ways to both gauge the effectiveness of their processes internally, and show their value to stakeholders. Thus, they need to incorporate straightforward reporting mechanisms. Clear-cut information increases communication and brings vulnerability management to everyone’s attention.
8. Single pane of glass: Last but certainly not least, finding the way to incorporate all of the aforementioned aspects in one place, promoting clear, uncluttered dashboard that supports easy data drill-down and quick execution of commands is a must for any management tools.

Putting Them All Together

Vulcan Cyber offers all of these components, integrating them into one platform that will reduce your enterprise’s digital risk: the platform prioritizes the vulnerabilities in the network according to the specific risk they pose to your environment. Then, through its remediation intelligence database, it promotes the most efficient solution to every vulnerability, saving your Security, IT and DevOps teams valuable time. Vulcan facilitates the remediation process through orchestrating and automation, enabling teams to remediate at scale. From detection to resolution, Vulcan Cyber automates and orchestrates the cyber hygiene lifecycle across infrastructure, applications, and codebase.

To learn more about how the Vulcan platform, contact us to schedule a demo.