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Vulnerability management is an effective way to enhance the overall security posture of your organization.
What Is Vulnerability Management?
It also involves monitoring your assets and devices continuously to identify issues and resolve them quickly.
It also allows you to stay updated with emerging security threats and protect your assets from them.
These can have many security vulnerabilities that can get bigger with time and convert into a security threat.
Vulnerabilities like these can increase security risks as attackers can find and exploit them to carry a full-blown attack.
This can pose many challenges in terms of finances, legal, and customer relationships.
Here are some of the benefits of vulnerability management for your organization.
So, by identifying vulnerabilities, you could assess and address them proactively.
Since its a continuous process, you might keep monitoring vulnerabilities and fix them as soon as they appear.
And if an organization fails to meet these standards and requirements, it may get penalized.
Vulnerability management, when done effectively, can help you maintain regulatory compliance.
This will enable you to assess and identify your vulnerabilities and patch them.
You must also update the software on time, manage inventory properly, enable correct configurations, etc.
Cost-Efficient
Vulnerability management can prove to be cost-efficient.
Companies have lost millions to attacks, and the repair process is also hugely money-intensive.
It will help you prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities first to eliminate exploitation.
In addition, these have business and customer data that attackers can gain access to and cause you harm.
So, apart from discovering your assets, you must also identify vulnerabilities in them.
you might use vulnerability scanners for this purpose.
you could also execute an audit to get a complete report on assets and vulnerabilities.
Prioritizing the assets also comes in handy when allocating resources to each one of them.
#3.Assessment
In this phase, you must assess the risk profiles associated with each asset.
For this, many organizations utilize the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
This open and free standard can help you evaluate and understand the characteristics and severity of each software vulnerability.
According to CVSS, the Base Score varies from 0 to 10.
The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) assigns the severity grade to CVSS scores.
In addition, the NVD contains data pulled by IT staff and automated solutions for vulnerability management.
This will also help you figure out which assets to fix first.
you’re free to also submit activity reports every week, twice a month, or every month.
This will help you stay updated with each vulnerability and ensure nothing is left undocumented.
In addition, you must put forward your strategy to remediate the known vulnerabilities.
It will give an idea to your team on how to proceed with the resolution and accelerate the process.
Each team member must clearly understand their roles and responsibilities.
You must carry out audits to reassess and ensure that all the vulnerabilities are eliminated.
This enables you to spot remaining issues, if any, and remove them.
You must also keep following up with your team to know the status of vulnerabilities and assets.
This way, the cycle of vulnerability management keeps on continuing.
Vulnerability Management vs.
Penetration Testing
Many confuse vulnerability management or assessment with penetration testing.
However, penetration testing is different from vulnerability management in many ways.
This testing is carried out by a penetration tester or ethical hacker using advanced techniques and tools.
Challenges in Vulnerability Management
While implementing vulnerability management, many organizations face certain challenges.
These are:
Therefore, its beneficial to use safer vulnerability management tools to automate these processes.
You may also explore some bestvulnerability management software.
