Traditional vulnerability management is in need of a desperate change due to the lack of effectiveness in combating modern cyberattacks. It’s a bold statement, but true, nonetheless, because it’s just not enough.
Numbers don’t lie, and the only direction the average cost of recovering from cyberattacks seems to move is up. Putting the monetary effect aside, a successful cyberattack from ineffective vulnerability management can fatally hit an organization’s reputation. This snowballs quickly into loss of business, and it’s only downhill from there.
All these arguments only support the fact that traditional vulnerability management isn’t effective in the current operating environment and highlights the consequences of its ineffectiveness.
The importance of reinventing it cannot be understated enough because the price of recovering from a cyberattack is hefty.
What’s Lacking in Traditional Vulnerability Management?
Traditional vulnerability management, or just looking at software vulnerabilities/CVEs, is what we’ve been following for the past three decades or so. But in the modern scenario of rapid technological transformation, cyberattacks are becoming ingenious and deceptively dangerous. With newer and devious ways of breaching your network’s cyber defense, attackers exploit risks beyond software vulnerabilities, significantly reducing the effectiveness of vulnerability management.
IT asset exposures, misconfigurations, deviations in security controls, and security anomalies are the new dangerous risks that attackers are exploiting. And traditional vulnerability management has no way of combating them and preventing cyberattacks.
In traditional vulnerability management, a disconnect exists between vulnerability scanning and remediation and the teams performing them. Typically, the info-security team takes charge of assessing vulnerabilities and continuously dumps the task of remediating the issues to the IT teams. IT teams, already understaffed, are often overwhelmed with fixing thousands of vulnerabilities.
Adding to the issue, the lack of integration and automation between vulnerability scanners and remediation tools further reduces the effectiveness of vulnerability management.
Making Vulnerability Management Effective with the Necessary Reinvention
Advanced Vulnerability Management (AVM) is the new way of effectively performing vulnerability management in a modern computing environment. It is the process of going beyond traditional vulnerability management with a broader approach to vulnerabilities by covering various other security risks. Advanced Vulnerability Management gives you a holistic view of your IT, discovering dangerous anomalies that can threaten an organization’s cyber defense.
By integrating vulnerability detection, assessment, and remediation into a unified, continuous, and automated process, Advanced Vulnerability Management increases the scope of detection and remediates dangerous risks with relevant security measures.
Advanced Vulnerability Management faces the challenge of risk beyond software vulnerabilities head-on by increasing the scope of detection. By harnessing smarter, faster, and more powerful scanners that can detect IT asset exposures, misconfigurations, and deviations in security controls, Advanced Vulnerability Management covers all possible attack vectors and ensures that no risks go under the radar.
With integration and automation as the core principle around which Advanced Vulnerability Management revolves, its effectiveness in preventing cyberattacks increases multiple-fold. It also increases the speed of responding to threats, not allowing a ‘threat to become an attack.’ Manually performing a vulnerability management task, like the correlation of vulnerability data between teams, gets taken out of the equation entirely, further improving productivity and efficiency.
Further, by aligning an organization with compliance policies and reducing the attack surface with preventive measures, Advanced Vulnerability Management reduces the attack surface and improves an organization’s security posture.
Closing Thoughts
In the modern, ever-evolving tech space, ineffective vulnerability management can only lead to one result. A fatal cyberattack completely destroys an organization. Effective vulnerability management can help prevent it, but a reinvention of the way we perform vulnerability management is in dire need in a modern computing environment.
