3 Best Practices to Modernize Your Vulnerability Management Program

Threat and vulnerability management (TVM) have evolved from the clinical practice of looking at vulnerability scanning results, threat intelligence and firewall reviews. Historically this practice has left organizations with unintegrated platforms that can’t operationalize findings to fill potential security gaps.

Discovering where you’re most vulnerable is a security priority and likely already part of your overall program. The ability to continuously identify threats and monitor unexpected changes in an organization’s network is critical. And the reason why most organizations are willing to invest in vulnerability scanning solutions to gain immediate global visibility into all assets and vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability management services (VMS) has evolved to a more modern strategy that takes threat management many steps further. It provides businesses with comprehensive security procedures that identify, prioritize and reduce vulnerability exposure across security and network environments through an orderly, systematic and data-driven approach. The striking difference is clear between VMS and TVM, VMS comes with a range of options:

• Weekly to monthly vulnerability scans
• Asset management
• Compliance assistance
• On-demand scanning and threat analysis

VMS is essential to run alongside security tactics to prioritize possible threats and minimize any attack surface. It helps organizations prioritize and operate as an extension of their team while applying current best practices to drive efficiencies and enable prioritization.

What are the Top Best Practices?

Whether you hire a managed security services provider (MSSP) to run all or part of your security program, modernizing your vulnerability management program should be a high priority. Following are the top best practices to employ:

1. Focus on visibility. Dashboards are vital for providing visibility into the perimeter and identifying assets and potential weaknesses in your perimeter. Prioritize critical assets first, platforms like Nuspire’s cloud-based portal allows clients to build their own customized environment view. The key is providing visibility, monitoring, alerts, threat analysis and reporting that is automated, easy to consume and self-manage.
   • Find a partner that has visibility and a dashboard that integrates with multiple technologies to help identify security gaps quickly and provides visibility into the inter-workings of the vulnerability management platform.
   • Many endpoint solutions don’t interface well with each other and can leave devices unidentified and assets misclassified and unprioritized. This results in patches not being fully applied. Find a provider that can identify all known and unknown assets.
   • Make sure you have technology that can automatically detect from everywhere (for complete visibility).

    

2. Leverage the latest techniques. Detecting vulnerabilities requires more than just ‘any’ technology. Threat actors evolve their techniques, so the technology used to detect attackers should keep up with that evolution.
   • Technology should outmatch the attackers and be able to go beyond standard detection with no additional configurations on your organization’s part.
   • Risk/attack simulators identify risks, even if there is more than one on an endpoint.
   • Make sure you can pinpoint your most critical threats and prioritize the remediation efforts.

    

3. Detect in real-time. Organizations must be able to rely on their partner for real-time intelligence to be able to prioritize and move quickly on the largest risks.
   • Limited security resources require optimization and creating efficiencies to decide when and how to patch.
   • Having a partner that operates as an extension of your team is important to get the risk identified at any time, and anywhere.
   • Real-time notifications are required to identify security changes or irregularities

There are more vulnerabilities in today’s unprecedented threat landscape than ever before. Inconsistencies and gaps in a cybersecurity program create more opportunity for threat actors to compromise your organization.

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