One of the most fundamental — and often overlooked — processes of a strong security posture is vulnerability management (VM). VM is much more than just running a vulnerability scan; it’s at the core of all the layers that make up solid cybersecurity.
Whether your organization has a simple infrastructure or consists of thousands of globally distributed endpoints, VM is essential. With networks becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, it’s critical to assess and remediate vulnerabilities on a regular basis.
What Is Enterprise-Grade VM?
Basic vulnerability scanners may identify threats, but they often lack the intelligence to help you act on them. The best VM solutions regularly identify, evaluate, report, and prioritize vulnerabilities in network systems and software in dynamic environments.
No matter how simple or sophisticated your IT environment is, having a centralized view of vulnerabilities across your entire network is vital. An enterprise VM system will have the flexibility to handle on-premises, cloud, or hybrid assets, and provide not just data, but context as well, so your team can focus on what truly matters.
Enterprise-grade VM programs include:
✓ Scanning local systems as well as the entire global network
✓ Segmenting reports into different locations, specific IT teams, and departments
✓ Correlating vulnerability data on dynamic assets
✓ Seamlessly integrating with other enterprise IT and security tools
✓ Creating efficiencies by being simple to deploy, learn, and maintain
Why Risk-Based VM Is Necessary
All IT environments have vulnerabilities, but not all of them pose equal risk. When it comes to VM, you need a solution that not only tells you whether a security alert actually represents a threat or not, but also helps you understand the level of risk to your unique network.
A risk-based solution will help you use the three pillars of information security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability (the CIA Triad). Risk-based VM evaluates vulnerabilities using real-world threat intelligence and takes into account how exploitable a vulnerability is.
Pro Tip: Look for a solution that combines this intelligence with real-world threat activity and industry-standard severity scores to rank vulnerabilities.
Other Functionality to Consider
Understanding the need for an enterprise-grade, risk-based VM tool is the first step. But what should you look for when choosing the right platform?
Platform Interface
As IT departments face turnover and staff shortages, there’s no time to waste learning or trying to use a complicated, unintuitive tool. While scans can be automated, not all fixes can. Technicians still need to interact with your VM solution to address the vulnerabilities. That’s why a prebuilt, intuitive interface is important.
Historical Data
A good system will also deliver far more than just the current state of your network. For example, historical data isn’t available on many VM tools in the marketplace. Historical data shows which assets were vulnerable, for how long, and what was done to address them.
Automated and On-Demand Scanning
Best practice says VM scans should be run monthly at a minimum, or anytime there’s a change to the system. Sometimes it makes sense to automate. Other times, you need on-demand scanning to validate issues that have been addressed or demonstrate how long vulnerabilities were on the system, track KPIs, and more.
Accuracy and Asset Correlation
Scan results need to be accurate and actionable. Enterprise VM solutions can distill results, reducing false positives that could otherwise waste your team’s time. Enterprise VM systems ensure accurate asset tracking, even when IP addresses or configurations change. Look for built-in asset correlation that ensures consistent visibility.
Data Management
Your VM solution should let you query against all scanned assets, see which devices haven’t been scanned in a certain period, devices where fix attempts have been made, and more. While some systems require you to compile data from various reports and figure out how to create a spreadsheet or other report to pull all the data together, enterprise-grade VM will let you tag and label devices as well as reports so you can search and sort to deliver exactly the results you need.
API
VM systems that support API integration can become a seamless part of your broader security stack. VM data can help enrich SIEM, SOAR, NAC and more. Integration with ticketing would allow a manager to apply a filter to return vulnerabilities that meet certain criteria and auto-assign a certain tech to fix them then follow up with automated validation activities.
To learn more about enterprise-grade, risk-based VM read our guide, The Case for Enterprise-Grade, Risk-Based Vulnerability Management.
