Best Vulnerability Management Solutions

The main basic elements of a vulnerability management process can be easily remembered as “the 4 Rs mantra” : Recognize, Realize, Repair and Record.

• Recognize: A thorough risk assessment analysis will identify vulnerabilities that could potentially affect your software, applications, and operational systems. One quick and effective process to recognize these issues would be to create a complete workflow of your operational system processes, thereby facilitating a clearer, linear perspective of all the areas where you may be potentially at risk.

• Realize: Next you will realize the seriousness of each potential threat to your operational systems. It is essential that you identify and prioritize the potency each possible threat and vulnerability represents to your operational systems. Once prioritized, you can create a step-by-step plan to eradicate those threats and vulnerabilities.

• Repair: Now you are ready to develop a “best course of action” plan to ensure these potential threats are never realized. For every threat and vulnerability, a fix, patch, or repair will need to be completed. At this time, it is a good idea to closely monitor those areas determined to be at risk and decrease the amount of access available to those areas. After all the recognized vulnerabilities have been addressed, you will need to go back to the beginning to retest every vulnerability, ensuring that all fixes, patches, etc. have been successful in stopping the perceived threats.

• Record: It is important to keep a record of all vulnerabilities discovered, the location of those vulnerabilities, efforts (fixes, patches, etc.) made to address them, and the effectiveness of those efforts. This will help your future efforts in identifying vulnerabilities and threats. Additionally, it will support significant responsibility and awareness for general security, ensuring important compliance standards are being met throughout your organization.

Communication is key in successfully implementing a vulnerability management plan.

All affected team players need to be identified and brought into the loop. This involves individuals at different levels of your organization, from security to IT, QA, and analysts, just to name a few. The individuals who use the systems and software and everyone who will be responsible for the repair and fix of the vulnerabilities will need to be made aware of each individual’s roles and responsibilities, in addition to the overall goals and objectives of the plan, to ensure the complete success of your vulnerability management plan.

Generally, vulnerability management is part and parcel of a successful SOC (security operations center). Vulnerability management’s main objective is to highlight areas of potential technical deficiencies throughout your systems, applications, and software. Most organizations with a credible SOC have integrated these processes into the framework of their organization. It is important to note that vulnerabilities could also be a result of manpower and the lack of consistent training processes resulting in the proper knowledge of how to effectively utilize your operational systems.

Vulnerability management tools have several benefits, including:

• Proactive identification of vulnerabilities.
• Process can be run repeatedly, which provides continuous protection.
• ​​Ability to create an inventory of all devices on the network, including vulnerabilities associated with the devices.
• Facilitates incremental improvements.
• Contributes to the meeting of data protection requirements and the facilitation of security.

When deciding on a vulnerability management solution, here are some key features you should look for:

• Continuous scanning and monitoring for vulnerabilities.
• Monitoring rule system determined by your IT department.
• Ability to set rules for notifications.
• Visualization of attack surface.
• Monitoring and analytics of attack vectors.
• Risk-scoring.
• Automated updates and patching.
• Patch management.
• Customizable reporting/compliance reports.
• Automatic remediation.