Fundamental Aspects of a Strong Vulnerability Management Program

Written by Jason Franks | July 20, 2022

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.

View full post