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Vulnerability Management Best Practices

Vulnerability management is becoming an ever-popular tool of choice for organizations trying to shield against cyber threats. In a world where everything is connected, you need to ensure your business isn’t leaving itself open to attack. Here are some vulnerability management best practices to keep your organization secure. 

Why Is Vulnerability Management Important for Enterprises?

Sometimes it takes seeing a price tag for business leaders to understand the importance of something. When it comes to vulnerability management, the fact that the average U.S. data breach costs about $8.64 million should get attention. 

Vulnerability management is a way of mitigating risks associated with enterprise network weaknesses. There are many of these, and the list gets longer by the day. It’s not just that the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, technology is changing faster and faster. Introducing vulnerability management tools and protocols allows organizations to stay ahead of these threats through better detection, documentation, and response.  

Build a Full-Blown Vulnerability Management Plan 

When running a business, there are some things you can keep on the back burner. For instance, updating your marketing materials is an important part of your organization, but failure to do so in time isn’t likely to cause immediate disaster. 

The same thing, however, can’t be said for vulnerability management. The whole point of these tools and protocols is to ensure that nothing terrible happens that would lead to massive data loss and potential liability. Still, enterprises need to have a fully fleshed out vulnerability management plan, not just some ideas to implement at some undetermined date. 

There are four main aspects to vulnerability management, which work together in a sort of cyclical defense system. Those four properties are detection, reporting, analysis, and mitigation. Vulnerability management works by constantly scanning your organizational assets. It doesn’t matter if it’s a server room or a single laptop, anything connected to your networks has the potential to create vulnerability. 

Your vulnerability management arsenal should continually scan all endpoints on your network, which will create a findings report. From there, it’s possible to decide whether actions are necessary for issue resolution. At this point, mitigation becomes the focus.  

Work with the Right People, Both Internally and Externally

One factor that needs to be considered in every organization’s vulnerability management plan is the personnel involved. It’s important to get people in your IT department who can make informed decisions about building a vulnerability management plan. 

However, many enterprises will find they want to add outside help to assure they have the best vulnerability management setup. Having top experts in vulnerability management working along with your team can be an ideal way to protect network systems. 

Have the Best Tools for the Job

This can be cited as another reason why it makes sense for many enterprises to work with a specialized network security company when building a vulnerability management strategy. Having the best tools and software applications is going to vastly improve the efficacy of your vulnerability management. While your internal team will be able to do some research, and likely have some expertise, it won’t be anywhere near the level of an external organization. 

When it comes to protecting your networks, it really doesn’t make sense to spare expenses. Being stingy on the front end can lead to much bigger problems down the line. 

Automate as Much as Possible

Automating as many processes in your vulnerability management suite as possible will be beneficial to your enterprise. Much of the detection aspects can and should be done autonomously. You’ll want these systems running as much as you can, as long as they don’t cause network disruptions. Your vulnerability management plan needs to be continuous. While it’s up to your organization to determine exactly what this means, outdated information isn’t going to protect your networks. 

Vulnerability management is an important aspect of securing enterprise networks. Following these best practices can help you build a much more formidable vulnerability management program.

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