As such attacks continue to grow, a vulnerability management program is vital to adequately protect your infrastructure, applications, and data.
What are the 4 Key Elements in a Vulnerability Management Program?
1.Vulnerability Assessment
An effective vulnerability management program helps assess risks, weaknesses and exposure threats. It then instils the required protections that reduce the likelihood of a breach of your sensitive data. Learn how to identify sensitive data on our blog.
2.Vulnerability Management Tools
These are vital tools that help identify and scan the vulnerabilities in your system, aid deep learning and AI configuration.
3.Integration and Alignment
A successful vulnerability management program must be linked to vulnerability databases and must be in sync with key stakeholders throughout the organisation as well as compliance and regulatory requirements.
4.Agility
A vulnerability management program needs to be agile enough to keep your organization safe. The security systems and related processes need to meet the ever-changing threat landscape and be cyber-resilient. Cyber-resilience and scale are also important considerations.
Steps to Building a Vulnerability Management Program
1, Assemble and choose your team wisely: It is vital to identify all the key players needed in your team. For instance, having a security director or manager in charge of vulnerability management, as well as at least one analyst who identifies, tracks and assesses vulnerabilities throughout your environment is necessary.
2,Obtain the appropriate tools: The right tools used by security teams aid in discovering flaws in the environment, providing detailed information about all of an organization’s assets and identifying the top vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to the organisation. Read also, how to conduct a cyber risk assessment.
3.Compare the threat landscape to your environment: By doing this you understand your organization’s assets and known vulnerabilities. Threat intelligence will assist you in determining the impact of a potential exploit which is another important factor in risk assessment.
4Knowing your assets, applications, and risk tolerance are essential: Understanding your current assets and the level of risk for your organisation is critical for effective prioritisation. Automated tools like SecurityShield by SureShield assists with this discovery task by identifying assets such as servers, workstations, virtual machines, storage arrays, and network infrastructure.
5,Measure, evaluate and prioritise your vulnerabilities: Platforms that combine real-world vulnerability intelligence, data science, automated risk analysis, customised risk metrics, and even risk-based SLAs are vital when selecting the right platform for your organisation.
6.Communicate, correct, and report: Your vulnerability management solution should facilitate, rather than obstruct, internal communication among key teams. It should also help you remediate quickly and efficiently. Using a software solution such as SecurityShield can be greatly beneficial to your organisations. It continuously scans servers or endpoints to search for flaws in software design. It discovers vulnerabilities, assesses their impact, classifies them, identifies risks they pose, and then generates a prioritized risk response remediation plan to fix them.
Broadly, SecurityShield helps to:
- Spot missing patches, errors and weaknesses in system configuration settings and general deviations from policy
- Map risks to non-compliance of regulatory controls like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or Payment Card Industry (PCI)
- Scan for more than 35,000 vulnerabilities and conduct nearly 100,000 checks across your networks
- Auto-discover and scan any IT assets
- Automate real-time continuous monitoring of IT assets
- Automate mapping of vulnerabilities to control frameworks
- Leverage big data analytics and machine learning for better organizational security
- Significantly lower cost of ownership in months
Protect your organization by implementing the right software solutions and tools. Read our blog posts to know more about us, or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for some insightful updates and information.