Top 5 Reasons You Need Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM)

 

Organizations must be certain their measures can prevent critical infrastructure . In order for enterprises to prevent data breaches, they must be able to accurately identify and remediate gaps in their defenses.

By implementing a risk-based approach to vulnerability, enterprises can reduce of being breached. Here are the top reasons why RBVM is touted as the next of vulnerability .

 

#1. CONTEXT IS KEY IN VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT

One of the biggest challenges organizations have with prioritizing vulnerabilities is the that they have no concrete understanding of . of what means, what services that provides, the ownership of , or even who maintains it.

There tends to be a large disconnect in trying to work with the list and the best way to remediate them. It can become a case of just throwing the large of list of vulnerabilities at an operations team and saying, “fix it.”

Security need to be able to provide that so can make good risk decisions.

 

#2. NO TIME

There is not now – and never will be – enough time to fix everything. Regardless of the size of the organization, or vulnerability management team, it is not an operational reality. The ability to whittle the list down to a reasonable amount of work that a team can do within a day, a week or even within a maintenance period is a particular challenge.

Often, there are far more issues that need to be addressed so companies need a way to streamline that process and effectively address the problems that will have the greatest impact on the organization.

 

#3. MISMANAGED RESOURCES

Standing in the way of executing efficient remediation is resource mismanagement. Numerous amounts of time, effort and resources are devoted to the collection and manipulation of data in order to produce risk analytics. Manual processing runs rampant. Most organizations lack a centralized way to collect the information, clean it up, make it useful and effectively report it to the necessary groups.

The people who are supposed to be focusing on actually fixing the problems or helping to guide that process are often wasting a lot of time working in spreadsheets and other very manual processes just to be able to get the information to a place where they can make any type of risk decision.

 

#4. RISK = MORE THAN JUST VULNERABILITIES

Risk is more than just vulnerabilities! Some security teams hold a bias that vulnerability scanning is the “end all” and that is how the organization frames risk program. However, there is an entire set of data and tools available that are designed to look at different aspects of the environment and can provide valuable vulnerability data.

In fact, being able to scan vulnerability data and also look at application scan data, pen test data, configuration scans, and security benchmarking CAN be considered part of the risk profile for an asset or even a larger business service or unit. Organizations are starting to embrace that idea, but they still face a lot of the same challenges with collecting just bare minimum data because now they are amplified trying to incorporate more and more risk information.

 

#5. IF EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, THEN NOTHING IS IMPORTANT

A large number of vulnerability management programs are currently failing at this. There is a perpetual fear in the industry that they are going to miss something or that the company is going to have a serious issue or suffer a major breach because they are lacking or missed a particular vulnerability. As a result, a lot of organizations are very hesitant to start adjusting or suppressing technical risk to certain technical items down in terms of priority.

More often than not, the general bias of most organizations is to push things up in criticality. Issues that we might consider objectively moderate or low, may start creeping into high and critical ratings.

CVSS has had this known bias for a long time and most risk programs are built on that idea. The long-term issue that shows up is that more and more vulnerabilities more keep getting pushed up to high and critical ratings, effectively leaving security teams with the problem that there are too many problems that need to be fixed right away. While the business mandates that you must fix all critical issues, if more and more issues keep getting deemed as top priority, it only detracts from what the real issues are and makes the problem worse.

 

Being able to effectively assess and look at problems and then appropriately prioritize or de-prioritize as needed is a critical need in vulnerability management that many organizations are starting to see with their risk programs.

 

Need help building your risk-based vulnerability management program?  Or looking to evolve your existing program? Download our solution brief “NorthStar Navigator: A Better Way To Manage Vulnerabilities” or schedule a demo of NorthStar Navigator today.