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How to Measure the Efficacy of Your Vulnerability Management Program?

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With the changing security landscape and the complex threat surface, security teams are engaged in the battle of their lives today. Even after deploying multiple solutions to execute each step of vulnerability management and trying different techniques, they still lack a tight hold on the process. In addition to this, vulnerabilities are continuing to rise year after year and are exploiting wildly.

All these things put security teams in a tough spot to evaluate what they are doing currently. The efficacy of the vulnerability management tool implemented in the network should be thoroughly assessed. Further, this step will aid you in strengthening the security of your enterprise.

The need for an efficient Vulnerability Management Program:

Having a robust, rapid, and advanced vulnerability management program in place will minimize security teams’ load and keeps attacks at bay. The program should scale behind the traditional approaches and aid security teams in combatting the existing vulnerability management challenges. The vulnerability management program should also be a right fit for the changing IT security landscape.

Implementing a vulnerability management program is one step and evaluating their performance is even more critical. Ask yourself these five questions to assess if your vulnerability management program is doing the job right.

Five questions to assess your Vulnerability Management Program:

  1. How often do you run vulnerability scans in your network?
    Vulnerability scans are an integral component of the vulnerability management program. Unless you have clear visibility over the vulnerabilities in your network, you can’t manage them well. But a critical question you need to ask yourself here is how often you run vulnerability scans. Most enterprises rely on periodic scans, where they detect vulnerabilities once or twice a month. These periodic scans will not save you from the eyes of attackers with raising vulnerabilities.
  2. Does your Vulnerability Management scanner give a lot of false positives?
    Vulnerability scanners are sometimes notorious for misreading scans. They might tend to report vulnerabilities that don’t exist. This also leads to false positives and unnecessary remediation. Thus, inaccurate vulnerability scanning lets down the whole vulnerability management process.
  3. What vulnerabilities do you remediate first in a massive pile of vulnerabilities?
    Once after scanning and detecting the significant number of vulnerabilities, randomly remediating them will not help reduce the organization’s risk. You should prioritize the vulnerabilities based on their criticality level before remediating them. With prioritization, you can understand the severity that each vulnerability possesses. Later, plan your remediation on the most critical ones first. This kind of risk-based vulnerability management approach will strengthen the vulnerability management program.
  4. How do you manage huge security gaps between detection and remediation of vulnerabilities?
    After vulnerability detection and assessment, remediation is the next crucial step. Many organizations give much attention and importance to detection, but they fall back to remediate the ones detected in real-time. According to a study by edge scan, organizations take a solid 60 days to remediate vulnerabilities. Suppose there is a lag in remediation; it often leads to a massive security gap. Further, this gives enough time for attackers to intrude on the network. Hence, ask yourself about the time you take to remediate the vulnerabilities.
  5. How do you analyze and evaluate the Vulnerability Management process?
    Vulnerability management is a continuous program that comes with several steps. The steps usually are scanning, detecting, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating. Once all the processes are done, you need to analyze and evaluate them to ensure you are doing the right thing. Relying on bulky, hard-to-read reports for evaluation will not do any good to scale your vulnerability management program. Without insightful and well-structured reports, you will face challenges in getting clear insights. This will also let down your vulnerability management program.

Tips to strengthen your vulnerability management program:

  • Automate daily vulnerability scans
    To ensure vulnerability scanning is a continuous process, automation is the key. You can schedule and automate the vulnerability scans to run every day in your network and reduce manual load. These automated scans will run silently in the background without interrupting users. Choose the right vulnerability management tool that will help you achieve automation seamlessly.
  • Leverage an extensive vulnerability database
    Your vulnerability management program, when put together with an extensive vulnerability database, things will be better. This will result in greater accuracy of vulnerability detection. The database should be up-to-date with the latest vulnerabilities. The vulnerability database should be more stringent and comprehensive that will lead to more accurate detection. Detection of vulnerabilities only with CVE data is not enough. A vulnerability database must be efficient to support all vulnerabilities, irrespective of CVE data. When a vulnerability database is massive, it will help in the effective detection of all the vulnerabilities. This will yield near-zero false positives.
  • Take the risk-based vulnerability management route
    When it comes to remediation, random efforts of remediating vulnerabilities are not feasible; instead, understanding the risks concerning vulnerabilities would result in a better approach. There is a need to focus on assessing and analyzing vulnerabilities based on their severity. Remediating the critical vulnerabilities should be a priority. To address critical vulnerabilities, CVSS stands for ‘Common Vulnerability Scoring System,’ which makes it easier to assign a severity score to any said vulnerability. Further, CVSS helps users to understand, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities based on their severity level. The severity level range from 0 to 10. The more severe threat is depicted by a score of 10.
  • Choose a vulnerability management tool with integrated patch remediation
    When vulnerability management comes with a robust patch management tool, remediation becomes seamless. This unique combination enhances the overall remediation process. It also keeps the systems up to date with regular patching. The role of integrated patch management in vulnerability management aids in remediating risks even before a threat occurs. Hence, it is essential to get your hands-on vulnerability management program that comes with a patch management tool. This will also boost productivity and remediate vulnerabilities quickly.
  • Get clear insights through vulnerability reports
    Choose a well-designed vulnerability management tool that offers insightful and customizable reports. Auto-generating reports and auditing processes can benefit an organization greatly. The reports should record all activities and produce necessary data when needed. IT teams can get timely and actionable insights that drive the program to success with all data in one place.

Implement an effective vulnerability management program with SecPod SanerNow

SecPod Sanernow gives you an advanced solution to meet the expectations of a modern vulnerability management program. With SanerNow, you can detect, assess, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities. It works on a unified cloud console and one powerful multifunctional agent. It is built on top of the world’s largest vulnerability database with more than 175,000 checks. With the industry’s fastest vulnerability scanning capability, SanerNow takes less than 5 minutes to detect vulnerabilities. It also rapidly remediates the vulnerabilities with the integrated patch management module.

Schedule a free demo here. Check out how SanerNow can help you implement a seamless vulnerability management program.

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