What are organizations doing right now to fill their vulnerability management gaps?
Experts carefully weigh technology, automation, compliance, and procedures to gain full visibility across their IT environment. It’s an ongoing lifecycle that takes time and collaboration to figure out. Vulnerability management (VM) can’t exist on an island. It’s time to stop thinking of VM as a siloed, isolated practice.
The State of Vulnerability Management Report surveyed 421 cybersecurity professionals who shared the facts and statistics behind what works for building a mature VM program.
Tech execs, managers, and IT security practitioners answered top questions about VM that will give you a real-world look at how they’re assessing risk.
What preventive measures are organizations turning to? How can you try them, too?
Before you dive into the report, here’s a shorter breakdown of how to weave VM into your existing processes so that it doesn’t feel like you’re adding more work.
What’s Inside Your Vulnerability Management Program?
Only 19% of organizations have achieved a high level of maturity in their VM program. Plenty of opportunities to do better, especially considering every organization spotted vulnerabilities.
26% of organizations spotted over 100 per month—that’s a high level of risk.
If you’re not performing regular scans, how can you know what needs remediation? And before you even start scanning, you need an evolving and active inventory of your current assets.
When planning a strong VM program, you need to pinpoint vulnerabilities, assess their risk level, and establish escalation triggers.
Respondents emphasized the need for full visibility, mainly in:
- Endpoints/desktops/laptops
- Servers
- Mobile and IoT devices
Along with the ability to keep track of them whether they’re at home, roaming, on the network, or in the cloud.
Here’s where automation lightens the workload with scanning and remediation.
Your Patch Deployment Speed Matters
Are you patching:
- On the same day
- After a week
- Monthly basis
- Longer?
Depending on your answer, you might expose yourself to vulnerabilities for too long.
If you’re taking over a week to patch, like 47% of respondents, you’re susceptible. Inaction is dangerous. Vulnerabilities love delayed patching.
Small but mighty teams say automated patch management drastically cuts patch deployment time and effort. They don’t have to sacrifice productivity to patch research, either.
When it comes to deployment, teams need convenience. Scheduling reboots and updates during off-hours makes deployment more straightforward and puts you in control. It also saves someone from being breached due to outdated software.
Eight Real-World Practices to Use for Your Vulnerability Management Program
As vulnerabilities increase, so does the need for continuous monitoring, effective patch management, VM, risk assessment, detailed reporting, proof of compliance, and 100% visibility.
Survey participants highlighted the VM features that were the most important to building their program. We’ve broken down their approaches into eight practices that have worked for other organizations. These are the best practices used by skilled teams, and they’re the same steps you can use to start your program.
These eight practices lead to full visibility and realistic workload expectations for smaller teams who want to automate responsibly.
2023’s Vulnerability Report breaks down the foundational steps to help you evaluate an already existing VM program or start one from scratch. It’s all the facts necessary to explain to your team and other departments why those recommended updates are the reason the business is staying protected.
