What is vulnerability management?
Vulnerability management is the ongoing process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and addressing vulnerabilities within an organization’s systems, applications, and network devices. It ensures that security vulnerabilities are mitigated before attackers can exploit them.
This process is proactive and cyclical, involving regular vulnerability scans, risk evaluation, remediation efforts, and continuous monitoring. By integrating vulnerability management into overall security strategies, organizations can reduce risks, comply with industry regulations, and maintain the trust of their customers and stakeholders.
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What are security vulnerabilities?
Security vulnerabilities are misconfigurations or bugs in software that can result in a breach, compromise, or takeover by malicious actors. For instance, failing to patch software after a new release can leave it exposed to a security vulnerability. If a threat actor exploits such a flaw, they could execute malicious code, leading to risks like zero-day remote code execution (RCE).
Why is vulnerability management necessary?
Cyberattacks are surging, with 364 million data breaches in 2023 and over 40 million sensitive records—including PII, health data, and financial information—compromised in a single month. Poor vulnerability management isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a business risk with severe consequences.
Consequences of weak vulnerability management
Costly data breaches: Sensitive information is exposed, leading to financial loss and reputational damage.
Compliance violations: Failing to meet regulations results in penalties and legal ramifications.
Operational inefficiencies: Threats disrupt workflows, drain resources, and erode customer trust.
As a result, businesses are investing heavily in solutions, with the global vulnerability management market projected to reach $18.7 billion by 2026, growing at 6.3% annually.
Benefits of strong vulnerability management
Stronger security posture: Proactively identify and remediate security risks to reduce exposure.
Streamlined operations: Integrate security seamlessly into daily workflows.
Enhanced visibility: Gain a clear, real-time view of vulnerabilities across environments.
Team empowerment: Equip employees with tools to take ownership of security.
Improved compliance: Meet industry standards with strong policies and controls.
Security is a shared responsibility
The traditional model of security being solely managed by IT teams is outdated. In today’s complex environments, vulnerability management must be democratized:
Cross-team accountability: Everyone, from developers to business leaders, must actively contribute to securing systems.
Empowering developers: By integrating vulnerability management into CI/CD pipelines, developers can address issues early without slowing innovation.
Sustained operational velocity: Security measures need to enhance—not hinder—business processes.
Vulnerability management isn’t just a technical safeguard; it’s a critical driver for organizational resilience and compliance.
Key components of vulnerability management
Effective vulnerability management relies on several interconnected components, each designed to strengthen your organization’s security posture. Let’s explore the critical elements that make up a successful program.
Asset visibility and context
To secure your environment, you need to know what you’re protecting. Maintain a comprehensive inventory of assets, including their configurations and interconnections. This visibility helps uncover gaps and ensures you understand the broader impact of potential vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability scanning and analysis
Regular scans are essential to identify potential vulnerabilities across your infrastructure, whether in cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Scanning provides the data needed to assess risks, keeping your systems resilient against known threats.
Risk prioritization framework
Not all vulnerabilities are equal. Rank them by factors like severity, exploitability, and business impact. This prioritization ensures your team focuses on fixing the most critical issues first, optimizing resource allocation.
Remediation strategies
Clear, actionable steps are vital for addressing vulnerabilities effectively. These could include patching, reconfigurations, or implementing compensating controls to reduce risks without disrupting operations.
Continuous monitoring and feedback loops
Threat landscapes evolve, and so should your approach. Continuous monitoring keeps you informed of emerging risks, while feedback loops allow you to refine strategies and stay proactive.
Automation and integration
Automation simplifies the vulnerability management process by detecting, prioritizing, and remediating issues at scale. Integrating these workflows into your existing systems ensures efficiency without sacrificing thoroughness.
Policy and compliance support
Strong vulnerability management helps your organization meet regulatory standards and maintain compliance. It enforces policies and controls that satisfy industry and legal requirements, helping to protect from penalties.
Threat intelligence
Threat intelligence provides real-time insights into emerging risks, helping organizations stay ahead of potential attacks. By understanding the latest attacker techniques, you can strengthen your defenses and address weaknesses before attackers exploit vulnerabilities in your systems.
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5 steps of the vulnerability management process
The five common steps of the vulnerability management process are:
Discover
Prioritize
Remediate
Validate
Report
We go into further detail on each below.
1. Discover
Enterprises should create a comprehensive topology of their IT assets, including VMs, containers, container registries, serverless functions, virtual appliances, ephemeral resources, and managed compute resources. Every component of an IT environment that is susceptible to vulnerabilities should be identified and accounted for.
The failure to discover even a single misconfigured IT asset can have severe consequences. A misconfigured endpoint resulted in a significant data leak for Microsoft in 2022. While Microsoft contests the severity of the data leak, the highest estimates suggested that the data of more than 65,000 entities across 111 countries had been compromised. The misconfigured endpoint has since been protected via strong authentication protocols.
Businesses should schedule recurrent and autonomous scanning of IT assets to ensure that known and unknown vulnerabilities are discovered and addressed regularly. Some vulnerabilities may evade scanning, and these need to be discovered with contextualized and targeted penetration tests.
Traditional VM tools only produce simple table-based reports with only a basic snapshot of vulnerabilities at a given time. Advanced vulnerability management solutions consolidate information from multiple scans and provide information on what has changed over time.
2. Prioritize
The hard truth is that vulnerabilities are always going to outnumber an organization’s security resources. Legacy vulnerability management solutions often flood enterprises with high volumes of contextless vulnerability alerts that take their focus away from actual threats. Therefore, businesses need context to identify those vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk so they can be remediated first.
Leveraging vulnerability data and threat intelligence allows organizations to categorize vulnerabilities based on specific business contexts. Remediation efforts need to be prioritized based on which IT assets are critically exposed and which vulnerabilities may have the most damaging blast radius.
3. Remediate
Enterprises should begin addressing their list of discovered and prioritized vulnerabilities, starting with the most critical cases. Remediation comes in many forms, including patching out-of-date software, decommissioning dormant IT assets, deprovisioning or rightsizing identity entitlements, decoding and solving misconfigurations, and identifying and accepting low-risk vulnerabilities.
Remediation may seem like the final stage of the vulnerability management process. However, vulnerability management would be incomplete without double-checking if the remediation efforts were successful and ensuring that the knowledge is used to strengthen security processes in the future.
4. Validate
It’s essential to validate vulnerability remediation efforts. Businesses need to be sure that critical vulnerabilities have successfully been mitigated. They also need to cross-check whether any unknown or consequent vulnerabilities were introduced during the remediation of known vulnerabilities.
Businesses can validate remediation efforts by meticulously redoing the entire process and by scanning and testing IT assets using various methods. Validation should be considered a critical step in the vulnerability management process rather than a formality after remediation.
5. Report
The insights generated from the vulnerability management process can significantly benefit companies in the long term. Businesses should use their vulnerability management platforms to generate visualized, contextualized, and consolidated vulnerability management reports, the details of which can reveal security strengths, weaknesses, threats, and trends.
These reports can help organizations evaluate the quality of their vulnerability management efforts and proactively optimize them. Reports can also support other security teams by providing them with vulnerability-centric data that could augment parallel security efforts.
How to implement an effective vulnerability management program
Effective vulnerability management programs require a structured approach and dedicated resources. Here’s how to set the foundation for success.
1. Build a dedicated vulnerability management team
To ensure consistent oversight and accountability, assign ownership of your vulnerability management program to a specialized team. This team should be responsible for coordinating efforts across departments, maintaining asset inventories, prioritizing risks, and driving remediation activities.
Clear roles and responsibilities are essential for success. Team members should include experts in areas like security operations, compliance, and DevOps, with defined tasks such as vulnerability scanning, risk assessment, and strategy implementation.
2. Invest in the right vulnerability management tools
The right vulnerability management tool can make or break your program. Choose solutions that offer comprehensive scanning for vulnerability detection across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. Look for tools that provide contextual prioritization to help your team focus on the most critical risks.
Automation is another must-have feature. Tools that streamline remediation processes—such as patch management, configuration changes, or compensating controls—save time and reduce the potential for human error. Additionally, integration with your existing security stack, like CI/CD pipelines or IT service management platforms, ensures seamless operations without disrupting workflows.
3. Establish an asset management baseline
Strong vulnerability management starts with knowing what you’re protecting. Create a comprehensive inventory of all assets, including devices, applications, cloud resources, and connections. Don’t overlook shadow IT—those unapproved systems or applications that operate outside official oversight—since they often introduce hidden vulnerabilities.
An up-to-date asset baseline ensures that every component in your environment is accounted for and assessed. This visibility not only helps identify gaps in coverage but also provides essential context when prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities.
4. Define a risk-based approach
Not all vulnerabilities pose the same level of risk, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Develop a framework to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact on business operations, exploitability, and the sensitivity of affected systems. This ensures your team focuses on the most critical issues first, minimizing risk to essential functions and sensitive data.
Incorporate factors like threat intelligence, asset importance, and business context into your decision-making. For example, vulnerabilities in systems handling customer data or financial transactions should take precedence over less critical assets. By aligning your efforts with business priorities, you can allocate resources more efficiently and improve your organization’s overall security posture.
5. Develop cross-team collaboration
Effective vulnerability management requires seamless communication between IT, DevOps, and security teams. Each group brings unique expertise to the table: security teams identify risks, IT implements fixes, and DevOps ensures that changes don’t disrupt workflows. Fostering collaboration between these teams ensures vulnerabilities are addressed quickly and efficiently without slowing innovation.
Encourage regular check-ins, shared dashboards, and integrated tools to keep everyone aligned. For instance, integrating vulnerability management into CI/CD pipelines allows security checks to occur alongside development, enabling teams to catch and resolve issues early. By breaking down silos, you create a culture where security is a shared responsibility, making it easier to streamline processes and protect your organization.
6. Embed vulnerability management into DevOps
Integrating vulnerability management into the development lifecycle—commonly referred to as DevSecOps—ensures that security is addressed from the start. By embedding security practices into CI/CD pipelines, developers can identify and remediate vulnerabilities as code is written, reducing the likelihood of issues making it to production. This proactive approach saves time, lowers costs, and enhances overall security.
To achieve this, use tools that scan for vulnerabilities in real time during development and provide actionable insights without disrupting workflows. Automating security checks, such as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanning or dependency analysis, allows teams to maintain operational velocity while addressing risks. DevSecOps not only strengthens your security posture but also fosters a collaborative environment where development and security goals align.
7. Create a response framework for critical vulnerabilities
Critical vulnerabilities require swift, decisive action to minimize potential damage. Establish a clear response framework outlining protocols for identifying, assessing, and mitigating high-priority threats. This should include predefined escalation paths, timelines for remediation, and responsibilities for each team involved.
For example, when a severe vulnerability is detected, your framework might specify immediate isolation of affected systems, expedited patch deployment, and communication with stakeholders. Regularly test and update these protocols to ensure they remain effective against emerging threats. A well-structured response framework ensures your organization can act quickly and efficiently when it matters most, reducing downtime and protecting critical assets.
8. Ensure continuous monitoring and adaptation
The threat landscape is always changing, so a one-time assessment won’t cut it. Implement continuous monitoring to detect vulnerabilities as they emerge across your environments. Tools that provide real-time insights and threat intelligence can help you stay ahead of attackers by identifying vulnerabilities before they escalate.
Equally important is adapting your strategies based on these insights. Regularly review and refine your vulnerability management processes to account for new attack vectors, updated compliance requirements, and lessons learned from past security incidents. Continuous monitoring and adaptation ensure your program remains effective, resilient, and aligned with the evolving security landscape.
9. Educate and empower employees
Your employees are the first line of defense against vulnerabilities. Regular training equips staff with the knowledge to recognize potential threats and understand their role in maintaining security. From developers learning secure coding practices to non-technical teams understanding phishing risks, education ensures everyone contributes to a safer environment.
Encourage a culture of security awareness by offering ongoing workshops, practical simulations, and easy-to-access resources. Empowered employees are more likely to identify vulnerabilities early and take proactive steps to address them. When security becomes a shared responsibility across your organization, vulnerabilities are less likely to slip through the cracks.
10. Align with regulatory and business goals
Ensure your efforts align with industry standards and regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS, to avoid penalties and maintain trust with customers and stakeholders.
At the same time, tie your vulnerability management initiatives to broader business goals like operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and innovation. For example, prioritizing vulnerabilities in critical systems that impact customer-facing applications helps minimize downtime and protects your reputation.
5 key features to look for in a vulnerability management solution
Choosing the right vulnerability management solution is crucial to safeguarding your systems while optimizing time and resources. Look for these five essential features to ensure your solution meets your organization’s unique needs.
1. Risk-based prioritization
The best vulnerability management solutions provide concise and contextualized lists of vulnerabilities for companies to remediate. These vulnerabilities should be prioritized based on a series of organization-specific risk factors. Addressing even one of these critical vulnerabilities can potentially be more impactful than addressing hundreds of inconsequential and low-risk vulnerabilities.
2. Continuous, agentless scanning
Agent-based scanning can be useful, but it is time consuming and resource intensive. Businesses should seek out vulnerability management solutions that feature continuous, agentless vulnerability scanning via cloud-native APIs. Agentless security approaches provide easy deployment options and continuous visibility and monitoring. They are also cost effective and save time and resources.
3. Deep contextual assessments across all technologies
Businesses are scaling their IT environments at unprecedented speeds. Therefore, they must choose vulnerability management solutions that can perform deep contextual assessments of a range of cross-cloud technologies and applications like VMs, containers, registries, serverless, and appliances to identify vulnerabilities.
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4. Integrations with SIEM, SOAR, and SCM
World-class vulnerability management solutions should be compatible and easy to integrate with existing security solutions from different providers, including:
Security information and event management (SIEM)
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)
Security configuration management (SCM)
This can help create streamlined routes to share vulnerabilities and insights between security programs.
5. Compliance
Every security solution must address and improve compliance. Businesses should choose vulnerability management platforms that can be easily configured to industry standards. Other compliance-related features to look for include the ability to customize security and compliance policies and controls, and to conduct compliance assessments as part of vulnerability management.
Manage vulnerabilities at the scale and speed of the cloud
Managing vulnerabilities in modern cloud environments requires solutions that can keep up with their complexity and scale. Traditional approaches often struggle to provide the speed and visibility needed to secure rapidly changing infrastructures.
The Wiz cloud-native vulnerability management solution helps organizations quickly detect vulnerabilities without configuring external scans or deploying agents across clouds and workloads. Schedule a free demo to engage with experts and understand how Wiz would benefit your use case.
As we scale and gain more customers, we are confident that we can tell them we are aware of all known vulnerabilities, and that new vulnerabilities will be quickly visible to us too.
Kashfun Nazir, Information Security Lead & Data Protection Officer, Atlan
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