Risk-based Vulnerability Management: In VM, more alerts do not equal more security. Cybersecurity solutions, in general, and vulnerability management specifically, need to do more to accurately detect and prioritize vulnerabilities based on cyber risk. Enterprises should demand automated and risk-based alert prioritization that allows security practitioners to focus on the vulnerabilities most critical to their specific and unique business environment.
Vulnerability Detection: Vulnerability management solutions are only as robust as the data they can obtain and leverage for vulnerability identification and intelligent management. Regretfully, not all VM solutions are equal in their detection ability. Security practitioners should look for VM solutions that continuously monitor your perimeter, cloud, and internal systems and can identify rogue or unknown devices in your network. Be sure to test any VM solution’s ability to prioritize vulnerabilities based on threat intelligence feeds and business-critical assets to make sure that the scan results you receive are beneficial for informed and efficient response.
VM Beyond Detection: Traditional VM products merely scan your networks and report on the data they discover. This conventional scanner-based approach typically runs vulnerability scans once every few days, resulting in outdated information and elevated risk exposure. Comprehensive VM solutions track the state of your systems to provide an ongoing, always up-to-date view of your security posture. Integration and orchestration with endpoint security offerings such as EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) and XDR (Extended Detection and Response) should also be considered, as VM solutions are inevitably deployed alongside endpoint security solutions. When building your VM strategy, make sure your solution leverages a robust agent-based approach and works well with your current or planned EDR or XDR solutions, assuring that you can leverage VM for the detection, identification, prioritization, and response to vulnerabilities, wherever they are.
Deployment and Perimeter Coverage: Traditional VM solutions installed within your networks require users to acquire, configure, and manage vulnerability management servers, perform backups on them, and handle patch updates on a continuous basis. In contrast, a more comprehensive vulnerability management solution should not require ongoing updates or database backups. Your VM solution should be able to automatically cover your evolving network perimeter, diverse endpoints, and the adoption of cloud services to cover multiple site locations. When assessing your vulnerability management strategy, make sure the solutions you rely on provide your organization with the scalability required to handle new devices, users, and locations to anticipate the inevitable changes that will happen to your network perimeter over time.
Capex and Hidden Costs: Some VM software solutions lock you in with up-front investments in equipment and require ongoing updates, database backups, etc. This can couple high upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) with potential hidden costs along the way. When selecting a vulnerability management solution, be sure to evaluate the solution’s capabilities against its cost of implementation and cost of ongoing management to accurately assess the TCO over time. Modern vulnerability management solutions should be accessible directly via a browser and scale easily to handle new devices, users, and locations.