Fundamental Aspects of a Strong Vulnerability Management Program
Many organizations are pursuing more robust, proactive measures for managing vulnerabilities in their information technology (IT) environments due to massive cybersecurity breaches.
The complexity of public- and private-sector infrastructure—with enormous attack surfaces and constantly evolving threats — has made monitoring the rapidly proliferating vulnerabilities across their ecosystems more challenging. Cybercriminals are exploiting chains of weaknesses in systems, applications, and people to capitalize on this opportunity.Organizations must deploy a vulnerability management process to protect themselves from today's modern threat landscape. Vulnerability management programs will go a long way toward achieving the resiliency necessary to combat today's threats. At the heart of these risk-based vulnerability-management programs are scanning solutions that can assess the environment and provide easy-to-understand reports that help prioritize the vulnerabilities that must be mitigated.
However, completing an assessment once is not the equivalent of a vulnerability-management program. Such a program must entail a continuous lifecycle to ensure that your organization’s IT environment keeps up with known vulnerabilities as they arise — and more emerge every day, if not every hour.
Focus on these areas when establishing a solid vulnerability-management process to mitigate cybersecurity threats.
Discover
- Inventory all assets across the network and identify host details, including the operating system and open services, to identify vulnerabilities
- Develop a network baseline
- Identify security vulnerabilities on a regular and automated schedule
Prioritize
- Categorize assets into groups or business units and assign a value based on their criticality
Assess
- Determine a baseline risk profile to eliminate risks based on asset criticality and vulnerability threats
Report
- Measure the operational risk associated with your assets based on your plans and policies
- Continuously monitor for suspicious activity and identify vulnerabilities
Remediate
- Prioritize and mitigate vulnerabilities based on the business risk
- Ensure that controls are established and followed by demonstrating progress
Verify
- Verify that the threats have been mitigated via follow-up auditing
Having a solid vulnerability-management program strongly enhances your cybersecurity resiliency.
If you are unsure how to implement one, contact Mission Critical Partners — we can help you get started.