A review of the evolution of vulnerability management to understand the components necessary for modernizing security programs.
While modern-day strategies for a complete and effective security posture must include a combination of proactive and reactive security tools and processes, a fundamental component must always be vulnerability management. While not a new technology or process by any means, vulnerability management (VM) remains a key tool in any enterprise’s security toolbox and should be used as part of its overall security best practices.
Traditionally, vulnerability management systems helped security teams identify, evaluate, prioritize, and mitigate public exposure and vulnerabilities in their organization’s critical assets to reduce the attack surface and maintain compliance. From the beginning, the fundamental goal was continuous visibility across an organization’s global attack surface.
These principles haven’t changed since the inception of vulnerability scanners over 20 years ago. However, the evolving attack vectors in organizations’ hybrid and multi-cloud environments have introduced new challenges to their effectiveness. Furthermore, the way enterprises implement their vulnerability management systems has changed because of infrastructure evolution.
Let’s briefly examine how we arrived at this point and identify some VM pitfalls that your organization, hopefully, is no longer subject to.
What is the difference between a vulnerability management system, vulnerability management software, and a vulnerability solution?
A vulnerability management system is a holistic approach to managing a vulnerability program and utilizes various software, tools, solutions, and advanced analytics to achieve this. An effective VM system addresses four stages: vulnerability identification, prioritization, remediation, and reporting, and provides the fastest, most accurate findings.
This article looks at the entire system of the vulnerability process and the components needed to achieve the most effective outcome to achieve continuous visibility.
