The health of digital business depends on effective vulnerability and patch management program that keeps the environment immune from cyber attacks and data breaches. IT security leaders must have focus and vision to reduce the attack surface with vulnerability management program. The goal of the program comprises of below objectives
- Increase communication and collaboration between vulnerability specialists, application security teams, IT team and software developers.
- Accelerate triage by prioritize vulnerabilities based on business impact
- Real time reports, dashboards for better analytics, prediction and forecasting
- Integration with ITSM, CMDB, SOAR and other patch management platforms
- Remove manual and silo’d processes and over reliance on spreadsheets and emails
- Vulnerability exceptions, vulnerability incident response requests, emergency patch workflows
- Assignment accuracy for better remediation
- Faster vulnerability prioritization and response times
- Productivity gain to utilize resource for high value add tasks
Vulnerability Program Maturity Model and Framework
The foundational building block to construct the vulnerability program should have established policies, standards, guidelines and compliance adherence. Business require to ensure that asset management best practices are adopted to discover, categorize and prioritize assets based on business risks. Determination of vulnerabilities and threats require effective utilization of technologies and selection of scan attributes, frequencies and scan types. Remediation and patching preference should be based on the risk prioritization and mitigation strategies. IT security leaders should develop and monitor the metrics of vulnerability management program that allows to produce security hygiene dashboards. The recommended Vulnerability management maturity model has been depicted in below diagram
Focus Areas to perform Vulnerability Mgmt. Maturity Assessment
Organizations should conduct assessments either with external parties or internal stakeholders to assess the maturity of Vulnerability management program. The assessor should define boundaries, assessment schedule, deliverable formats, scoping and scoring criteria that ease the engagement. The recommended vulnerability management maturity assessment scoring criteria has been depicted in below diagram
The outcome of assessment should have key recommendations that helps business to enhance the program towards highest level of maturity.
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