What is vulnerability management?
Vulnerability management is the end-to-end process of identifying, evaluating, prioritizing, remediating, and reporting on security flaws in your environment, from unpatched software to misconfigured cloud resources.
This proactive, cyclical process involves performing regular vulnerability scans, risk evaluation, and remediation efforts and continuous monitoring. By integrating vulnerability management into overall security strategies, organizations can reduce risks, comply with industry regulations, and maintain their customers’ and stakeholders’ trust.
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Why is vulnerability management necessary?
Poor vulnerability management isn’t just a technical issue—it’s also a business risk with severe consequences. Attackers increasingly exploit overlooked weaknesses like misconfigured IAM roles, exposed APIs, or over-permissive containers.
The consequences of weak vulnerability management
Below are some common results of weak vulnerability management:
Costly data breaches: Exposing sensitive information leads 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. For instance, experts estimate that the global vulnerability management market will reach $18.7 billion by 2026 at a 6.3% annual growth rate.
The benefits of strong vulnerability management
Below are some positive attributes of effective 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 the tools they need to take ownership of security.
Improved compliance: Meet industry security standards with strong policies and access controls.
Security is a shared responsibility
The traditional model of security, where security teams are the sole managers, is outdated. Instead, organizations must democratize vulnerability management from code and runtime to post-deployment monitoring and incident response.
Here’s how you can do so:
Cross-team accountability: Everyone, from developers to business leaders, must actively contribute to securing systems.
Empowered developers: By integrating vulnerability management into CI/CD pipelines, developers can address issues early without slowing innovation.
Sustained operational velocity: Security measures must enhance, not hinder, business processes.
Vulnerability management is a critical driver for organizational resilience and compliance.
Key components of vulnerability management
Effective vulnerability management relies on several interconnected components to strengthen your organization’s security posture. Below are the critical elements that make up a successful vulnerability management program:
Asset visibility and context
To secure your environment, you need to know what sensitive data you’re protecting. To figure this out, maintain a comprehensive inventory of your assets, including their configurations and interconnections. This visibility helps you uncover gaps and ensures that you understand the broader impact of potential vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability scanning and analysis
Regular scans are essential for helping you identify potential vulnerabilities across your infrastructure, whether that’s in your cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Scanning provides the data you need to assess risks so you can protect your systems from known threats.
Risk prioritization framework
Not all vulnerabilities are equal—so rank them by factors like severity, exploitability, and business impact. This way, your team can prioritize fixing the most critical issues first and then optimize resource allocation. Context-aware prioritization also helps your team focus on vulnerabilities with exploitable paths, not just high CVSS scores.
Remediation strategies
Clear, actionable steps are vital for effectively addressing vulnerabilities. These could include patching vulnerabilities, reconfiguring access, or implementing compensating controls to reduce risks without disrupting operations.
Continuous monitoring and feedback loops
As threat landscapes evolve, so should your approach. Using continuous monitoring informs you 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. Look for tools that offer auto-remediation and infrastructure as code fix suggestions or integrate ticketing into DevOps workflows.
Policy and compliance support
Strong vulnerability management helps your organization meet regulatory standards and maintain compliance. It also enforces policies and controls that satisfy industry and legal requirements to protect your organization from penalties.
Threat intelligence
Threat intelligence provides real-time insights into emerging risks, which helps your organization 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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The vulnerability management process in 5 steps
These are five common steps of the vulnerability management process:
Discover
Prioritize
Remediate
Validate
Report
Dive into further detail on each below:
1. Discover
It’s important to identify and account for every component of an IT environment that’s susceptible to vulnerabilities. Because of this, enterprises should create a comprehensive topology of their IT assets, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, container registries, serverless functions, virtual appliances, ephemeral resources, and managed compute resources.
Be sure to schedule recurrent and autonomous scanning of IT assets as well to ensure that teams regularly address and discover both known and unknown vulnerabilities. Some vulnerabilities that evade scanning may also require contextualized and targeted penetration tests.
Failing to discover even a single misconfigured IT asset can have severe consequences.
For example, in 2024, a continuous cryptojacking campaign exploited a misconfigured Kubernetes endpoint that allowed anonymous access to an Internet-facing API server. During this attack, the attackers deployed malicious containers across multiple namespaces by running a DERO cryptominer disguised as a legitimate “pause” container. The campaign remained active for months, adapting to evade detection. This situation highlights how a single oversight in access control can expose entire cloud environments to abuse.
After Wiz identified the misconfiguration, experts said that the incident “should encourage organizations to adopt a security-posture solution, enabling security teams to mitigate toxic risk combinations and reduce attack surfaces [that are] vulnerable to threat actors.” This is where automation for scanning and discovery helps teams expedite and flag these vulnerabilities.
Beyond this, however, the right tools also contextualize and prioritize possible threats for quick remediation.
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
Many organizations use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), a widely adopted open framework for scoring vulnerabilities for severity, to prioritize risks in their environments. A CVSS score can range from 0 (none) to 10 (critical) based on three main metrics: base, temporal, and environmental.
But CVSS scores alone can’t tell you what’s actually exploitable.
The hard truth is that vulnerabilities are always going to outnumber an organization’s security resources. Because legacy vulnerability management solutions often treat dev and test vulnerabilities the same as production exposures, businesses need context to identify the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk for teams to remediate first.
Leveraging vulnerability data and threat intelligence allows organizations to categorize vulnerabilities based on specific business contexts. They should then prioritize these remediation efforts based on which IT assets are critically exposed and which vulnerabilities may have the most damaging blast radius. Automatic prioritization from tools like Wiz also points out the most critical vulnerabilities so your team can act more quickly.
3. Remediate
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. When addressing your list of discovered and prioritized vulnerabilities, start with the most critical cases.
To maximize your impact, you can also integrate remediation into CI/CD pipelines with automated patching, workflow management via ITSM tools, and canary deployments to reduce risk in production.
The best way to conduct effective remediation, though, is by adopting a cloud native application protection platform that brings your entire multi-cloud environment together into full focus. Platforms like Wiz provide all the tools you need to secure your cloud infrastructure, especially for remediation and response. That way, you get continuous scanning, auto-remediation, prioritized and contextual risk assessments, and real-time visibility—all in one place.
4. Validate
Teams should consider validation a critical quality control step rather than a checkbox. After all, it’s essential to validate vulnerability remediation efforts to confirm that you’ve fully resolved vulnerabilities. You also need to cross-check whether teams have introduced any unknown or consequential vulnerabilities while remediating known vulnerabilities.
You can validate your remediation efforts by meticulously redoing the entire process and scanning and testing IT assets using various methods. Effective validation should combine rescanning, automated and manual testing, integration with QA and test automation, and triggering incident response workflows when remediation fails or you uncover new threats.
5. Report
The insights your team generates from the vulnerability management process can significantly benefit companies in the long term. Because of this, 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.
To measure program effectiveness, track metrics like mean time to remediation, recurrence rate, service-level agreement compliance, and coverage. Additionally, consider integrating security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms for enhanced reporting and incident correlation.
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 augments parallel security efforts.
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How to implement an effective vulnerability management program
Effective vulnerability management programs require a structured approach and dedicated resources. Here’s how to create the foundation you need for success:
Prioritize coverage first
Strong vulnerability management begins with knowing what you’re protecting. Start by creating a comprehensive inventory of all assets, including devices, applications, cloud resources, and connections.
An up-to-date asset baseline ensures that you account for and assess every component in your environment. This visibility not only helps you identify gaps in coverage but also provides essential context when you’re prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities.
Don’t overlook shadow IT—unapproved systems or applications that operate outside official oversight—since they often introduce hidden vulnerabilities.
Shift risk ownership left
Fostering collaboration and shifting left by embedding security from development through deployment enables teams to address vulnerabilities quickly and efficiently without slowing innovation.
Integrating vulnerability management into the development lifecycle ensures that teams address security from the start. By embedding security practices into CI/CD pipelines, developers can identify and remediate vulnerabilities as they write code, which reduces the likelihood that issues will make it to production. This proactive approach saves time, lowers costs, and enhances overall security.
Build a dedicated vulnerability management team
Assign ownership of your vulnerability management program to a specialized team to ensure consistent oversight and accountability. This team should coordinate efforts across departments, maintain asset inventories, prioritize risks, and drive remediation activities.
Clear roles and responsibilities are also essential for success. As such, teams should include experts in security operations, compliance, and DevOps, as well as defined tasks like vulnerability scanning, risk assessment, and strategy implementation.
Align with risk
Not all vulnerabilities pose the same level of risk, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Instead, develop a risk-based framework to help you prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact on business operations, exploitability, and the sensitivity of affected systems.
This ensures that your team focuses on the most critical issues first and minimizes risk to essential functions and sensitive data.
Automate and integrate for scale
The right vulnerability management tool can make or break your program (popular tools include OpenVAS, OpenSCAP, and Nmap). But when you choose solutions, find tools that offer comprehensive scanning across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. Look for tools that provide contextual prioritization too so your team can focus on the most critical risks first.
Tools that streamline remediation processes through automation, such as patch management, configuration changes, or compensating controls, also save time and reduce the potential for human error.
Track what matters
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. Start by reviewing and refining your vulnerability management processes to account for new attack vectors, updated compliance requirements, and lessons you learn from past security incidents. You should also skip vanity metrics like vulnerability count and instead focus on time to triage, time to patch, and the exploitable risk percentage of criticals your team resolved in production.
Key features to look for in a vulnerability management solution
Choosing the right vulnerability management solution is crucial for safeguarding your systems while optimizing time and resources. Look for these five essential features to ensure that your solution meets your organization’s unique needs:
1. Risk-based prioritization
The best vulnerability management solutions provide concise, contextualized lists of vulnerabilities for companies to remediate. Wiz, for example, goes beyond CVSS by factoring in identity permissions, data sensitivity, Internet exposure, and blast radius.
Teams should prioritize these vulnerabilities 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, low-risk vulnerabilities.
2. Continuous, agentless scanning
Agent-based scanning can be useful, but it’s also time-consuming and resource-intensive. Instead, 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—plus they’re cost-effective and save you time and resources.
3. Deep contextual assessments across all technologies
Businesses are scaling their IT environments at unprecedented speeds. Because of this, they must choose vulnerability management solutions that can perform deep contextual assessments across a range of cross-cloud technologies and applications—such as VMs, containers, registries, serverless, and appliances—to identify vulnerabilities.
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4. Integrations with SIEM, SOAR, and SCM
World-class vulnerability management platforms should be compatible and easy to integrate with your existing security solutions, even if they’re from different providers. These solutions include the following:
SIEM
SOAR
Security configuration management (SCM)
Integrating these solutions can help you create streamlined routes to share vulnerabilities and insights between security programs.
5. Compliance
Every security solution must address and improve compliance.
To start, businesses should choose vulnerability management platforms that they can easily configure to industry standards. Other compliance-related features to look for include the ability to customize security and compliance policies and controls, as well as conduct compliance assessments, as part of vulnerability management.
Manage vulnerabilities at the scale and speed of the cloud
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
Managing vulnerabilities in modern cloud environments requires solutions that can keep up with their complexity and scale. However, traditional approaches often struggle to provide the speed and visibility to secure rapidly changing infrastructures.
That’s where Wiz comes in. Its 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 with Wiz’s experts today to learn how this solution can strengthen your cloud environment.
Want to cut through vulnerability noise and focus on what’s truly at risk? Check out Wiz’s free 1-on-1 vulnerability assessment.
