Security teams are faced with an ongoing challenge when it comes to exposure and vulnerability management. It’s not the actual discovery of the vulnerability that poses the challenge, but what to do once you discover one. Without a structured process, IT and security teams struggle to address vulnerabilities efficiently, and are in a constantly reactive mode, and struggle to address vulnerabilities efficiently, increasing potential risks.
In IDC’s Worldwide Device Vulnerability Management Forecast 2024-2028, many organizations reported using vulnerability scanning tools, but noted that their scanning frequency was low, indicating a lack of defined workflows for acting on the results.
The time between vulnerability discovery and remediation represents a critical window of opportunity for an attacker. This gap in remediation has become increasingly concerning as the volume of vulnerabilities continues to grow exponentially. Some organizations can take weeks or months before they address vulnerabilities, putting them at greater risk of security incidents. It is increasingly critical to build a consistent vulnerability management workflow that can close these gaps across teams, tools, and time. By moving from an ad hoc vulnerability management approach to a structured, consistent approach, security teams can dramatically increase their effectiveness, reducing organizational risk.
What Is Causing This Gap?
Organizations face several challenges contributing to this gap between vulnerability discovery and effective remediation.
- Organizational silos exist between security teams and IT teams due to different priorities and objectives. Security teams identify vulnerabilities but often lack the system access or authorization required to implement fixes themselves. IT operations and development teams control the systems but must balance security fixes against competing work priorities. Without established coordination, this division creates significant friction and delays remediation.
- The sheer volume of vulnerabilities detected by modern scanning tools overwhelms many security teams. A single comprehensive scan can identify thousands of potential issues across the organization’s environment, and without an effective prioritization mechanism in place, teams struggle to distinguish between critical exposures that require immediate attention vs others that do not.
- Many organizations lack structured workflows and operate with ad-hoc processes that vary across teams. This creates confusion around basic procedures, vulnerabilities can easily slip through the cracks or remain unaddressed for an extended period of time.
- Reliance on manual processes can also significantly hamper remediation efforts. Transferring vulnerability information across systems manually is time consuming and error prone.
- This approach cannot scale to handle the volume of new vulnerabilities being introduced each day and introduces unnecessary delays at each step.
What Does a Consistent and Effective Workflow Look Like?
- Discover: Effective vulnerability discovery requires comprehensive, regular scanning across the entire environment to identify security weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. This includes all asset types, from traditional to cloud, IoT, and OT, and provides business context to highlight critical processes and high-risk assets and applications.
- Prioritize: Not all vulnerabilities pose the same level of risk, so organizations must analyze each with real-world exploitability, exposure level, and business impact. Vulnerabilities on critical systems or those exposed to the internet may need urgent attention to critical issues first.
- Remediation: Organizations can then execute the actual fix by applying patches, implementing configuration changes, or deploying compensating controls based on prioritization, and resources.
- Validation and Reporting: After remediation actions are taken, validation confirms vulnerabilities have been properly addressed. This could involve rescanning to verify remediation, documenting the resolution, and updating any relevant tracking systems. Comprehensive reporting provides visibility including technical details for security teams to risk reduction for executives. Validation closes the loop and prevents the false sense of security that comes from assuming remediation was successful.
- Continuous Monitoring: Exposure and vulnerability management is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process. Continuous monitoring ensures new vulnerabilities are quickly identified, changes to the environment are tracked, and the overall security posture is maintained.
Best Practices for Organizations
- Automate Where Possible: Automation is essential for scaling vulnerability management processes in modern environments. Organizations should implement automation throughout the workflow, from discovery through verification. This helps enhance speed, consistency, and resource efficiency. Automation can also handle routine tasks such as scanning, ticket creation, patch deployment for standard systems, and verification checks, freeing up security teams to focus on complex vulnerabilities that may require human expertise.
- Prioritize Based On Risk, Not Just CVSS: Develop a comprehensive risk-based approach that considers business context, threat intelligence, and potential impact to critical business functions. This ensures remediation efforts focus first on vulnerabilities that truly matter, rather than those that just score high in generic ratings.
- Better Alignment with Security and IT teams: Effective exposure and vulnerability management requires close collaboration between security teams who find issues, and IT teams who implement fixes. Break down these organizational silos by establishing shared goals, implementing clear communication channels, and developing mutual accountability for vulnerability metrics. If possible, create cross-functional vulnerability response teams with representatives from both security and IT to drive coordinated action.
How to Know if It’s Working
- The most obvious sign of an effective workflow will be reduced remediation time, particularly for high-risk vulnerabilities. Track the amount of time to remediate by severity level and watch for consistent improvement. Organizations with mature processes typically reduce critical vulnerability remediation time from months to days or weeks.
- When the same vulnerabilities repeatably appear across systems or return after supposed remediation, it indicates process failures. A well-functioning workflow addresses root causes and implements systemic fixes, decreasing recurring vulnerabilities. This can require collaboration with development teams to eliminate the vulnerability at their source.
- Mature exposure and vulnerability programs provide comprehensive visibility across the full attack surface. This means fewer surprise findings during audits or penetration tests, better coverage of all assets, and the ability to quickly determine exposure when new vulnerabilities are discovered. Complete visibility enables proactive rather than reactive security management.
Partner with LevelBlue to Transform Your Exposure and Vulnerability Management Workflow
LevelBlue supports security teams by securing their full attack surface through comprehensive exposure and vulnerability management services. By combining industry-leading vulnerability management tools, offensive security testing, and hands-on expertise, we enable teams to discover, validate, and remediate vulnerabilities faster and more effectively. Our approach streamlines processes, closes gaps across systems and teams, and builds a program that strengthens resilience and supports day-to-day operations.
We offer service tiers that enable you to adapt and scale within your exposure and vulnerability program. This progression allows you to systematically build capabilities and evolve your security program from a compliance-focused approach to a risk driven strategy, all while aligning investments with your current maturity level and strategic security roadmap. Learn more about our service tiers here.
