Elevate Enterprise Security with Continuous Vulnerability and Exposure Management

Deciding if the security strategy implemented is effective in the long run has always been a challenge. As the organizational IT landscape increases, securing them becomes complicated! According to SecPod’s Annual Vulnerability Report 2023, there is a 52% increase in zero-day vulnerabilities compared to the year 2022.  It’s time IT security teams gear up security strategies/vulnerability management tools beforehand and be prepared for the potential rise of critical vulnerabilities.

Where are IT Security Teams Going Wrong while devising security strategies?

• Is it the security process followed?
• Is it due to the tool opted?
• Is it due to a lack of collaboration?
• Is it due to an outdated approach to cybersecurity?
• Is it due to lack of visibility of IT infrastructure?
• Is it due to a rise in false positives?

Let’s dive deeper, try to answer all these questions, and understand the new strategy approach for preventing IT infrastructure

Understanding Continuous Vulnerability and Exposure Management (CVEM)

Continuous vulnerability and exposure management gives a fresh perspective to cybersecurity. It evaluates organizational infrastructure from the “Weakness Perspective,” allowing IT and security teams to stay ahead of attacks and strengthen their strategy.

You might be wondering what exactly we mean by the weakness perspective. To put it into simple words, it’s the analysis of the entire IT infrastructure, including security controls, assets, user privileges, software installed, and each and every security aspects which needs to be inspected.

Understanding this perspective gives us a clear understanding and insights into your IT network. You will be able to:

• Get detailed, granular visibility of your IT infrastructure
• Know your weaknesses and devise controls
• Evaluate and know how your security controls are functioning
• Identify gaps and learn about your strengths
• Know where loopholes are present

The Other Perspectives

While the weakness perspective acts as a central pillar in preventing cyberattacks, there are other perspectives that support it.

• Detection Perspective:  It’s common for organizations to start developing a prevention or remediation strategy after an attack has occurred. However, it’s almost impossible to prepare a response plan, considering the different ways an attack can occur. But what if there was a prevention plan beforehand? Wouldn’t it have helped in stopping a cyberattack?

• Data Perspective: This approach focuses a lot of importance on protecting data, seeing it as a valuable thing that must be kept safe. However, it faces problems similar to those of the detection perspective. Even though protecting data is crucial, there’s more to an attack than just the data involved. 

• Attacker Perspective: This perspective tries to understand the attacker’s mindset. It’s particularly hard because there isn’t a common way to describe and understand attackers. Further, trying to anticipate the actions of attackers without a clear, uniform method to guide them on how to think about or describe them is complicated.

• Device, Application, Network, and User Perspectives: All these approaches focus on protecting the central part of the network, considering it the most crucial element. Although they offer important understandings, these are somewhat restricted when it comes to stopping cyberattacks. 

Now that we have understood the weakness and other perspectives of continuous vulnerability and exposure management, how does this help overcome the IT environment challenges?

Overcoming the challenges of IT network through CVEM

Challenge No. 1: Lack of Deeper Insights into the IT Infrastructure

Traditional tools often provide a limited view of your organizational assets and software present in your IT network with no actionable insights. As a result, IT security teams overlook the most obvious attack vectors that can lead to massive security breaches.

With CVEM, you can get a comprehensive view of your entire IT network in a single unified dashboard without the hassle of switching between tabs for information on the risks detected.

Challenge No. 2: Vulnerabilities beyond CVEs are left out

With traditional vulnerability management tools, you will be stuck with vulnerabilities that have CVE assigned, but what about other security risks without CVEs?

With CVEM, you can run continuous and real-time scans to detect vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, anomalies, exposures, and other security risks.

Challenge No. 3: Lack of Integrated Remediation Capabilities

Many traditional tools fail to offer integrated solutions for fixing detected vulnerabilities. As a result, these vulnerabilities remain within the network, creating opportunities for attackers to take advantage of.

With CVEM, vulnerability and patch management will be integrated, making remediation easier, on-time, and accurate. Along with patching, you can leverage other security controls and mitigate numerous security risks. Additionally, a unified vulnerability management (UVM) approach should be adopted. With a holistic strategy, UVM covers the entire IT landscape with thorough risk assessment, prioritization, and remediation.

Challenge No. 4: Siloed interfaces & multiple-point solutions approach

Traditional tools often rely on siloed interfaces and multiple tools to manage security risks and weaknesses. Moving between these different tools is difficult, takes a lot of time, and requires a lot of manual work.

With CVEM, you can automate all the tasks from scanning, detection, assessment, and prioritization to remediation with the SanerNow vulnerability management tool and make it a hands-free process in a single console. 

Narrowing down the millions of challenges faced by IT and security teams. These four challenges play a crucial role. Here are the advantages of CVEM when compared to other tools. 

Implementing Continuous Vulnerability and Exposure Management (CVEM) With SanerNow

Modern Security Problems need Modern Solutions

SanerNow CONTINUOUS VULNERABILITY AND EXPOSURE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS fill the significant gaps left by traditional methods and enhance your organization’s protective measures through its all-in-one approach. It adopts a ‘weakness perspective,’ continuously scans your organization’s IT network for potential loopholes and the entire network to address and remediate risks. 

SanerNow combines seven powerful modules into a single, seamlessly integrated solution that makes the process of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating security risks simpler, covering everything from finding vulnerabilities, exposures, misconfigurations, and others to fixing them.

1. Asset Exposure: It gives you a detailed overview of the assets present in the IT network and also allows you to blacklist, whitelist, and also have control over outdated and rarely used applications.

2. Continuous Posture Anomaly Management: It comprehensively evaluates your devices by identifying aberrations, deviations, and outliers within your IT environment. It monitors hundreds of parameters across devices using statistical analysis and machine learning to detect potential risks and unusual activities in your network.
   
3. Vulnerability Management: Experience the industry’s fastest 5-minute scans to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, anomalies, IT asset exposures, and compliance deviations.
   
4. Compliance Management: Attain HIPAA, PCI, NIST, STIG, and other compliance benchmarks with just a click of a button. Additionally, it makes compliance reporting easy with auto-generated reports that are ready to audit.
   
5. Risk Prioritization: World’s first solution based on the CVSS- SSVC-based framework, it helps you rapidly combat an exponentially rising number of security risks for faster attack surface reduction.
   
6. Patch Management: Integrated patch management for Windows, mac, and Linux OS and 450+ third-party applications. It also supports patch rollback without causing any downtime or errors.
   
7. Endpoint controls management: Manage and monitor 100+ security controls, endpoint health monitoring, system troubleshooting, software deployment, application and device control, and more.
   

Conclusion

The scope of potential security threats is vast, yet the current vulnerability/patch management tools for managing vulnerabilities and exposures are not managing to keep up. The traditional methods haven’t been effective, leading to an increase in cyber-attacks. There’s a need for a new approach. Prioritizing the prevention of cyberattacks, rather than just reacting to them, is essential. Focusing on managing vulnerabilities and exposures and reducing the attack surface should be the main focus. A deep understanding of security risks and an active strategy to strengthen our defences are crucial for protecting your IT environments. CONTINUOUS VULNERABILITY AND EXPOSURE MANAGEMENT is the solution to achieve a network that is free from cyberattacks.

Also Read: Reports That Show Enterprise Security Needs More Investments