What is vulnerability prioritization?
Vulnerability prioritization is the process of identifying and assessing security vulnerabilities based on their severity, potential impact, exploitability, and business context. Implementing a vulnerability prioritization program helps security experts and executives focus their remediation efforts on the most critical vulnerabilities throughout the management lifecycle.
While the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) plays an important role in prioritization, your program should extend beyond scores. This is because they often don’t accurately reflect vulnerability exploitation and the greater impact on your operations.
However, when you prioritize vulnerabilities through a holistic program, you can tackle security threats based on their criticality and address those that pose the greatest risk to your organization first. This kind of strategic prioritization allows you to make better use of your limited resources and helps you comply with regulations that require you to promptly mitigate identified vulnerabilities.
In 2024 alone, publications have reported more than 40,000 vulnerabilities. This may sound overwhelming, but you can easily protect your organization using vulnerability prioritization techniques that help you approach cloud security vulnerabilities more effectively.
Let’s take a closer look at the security measures and security best practices you can implement for your cloud environment.
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Key factors to consider for effective vulnerability prioritization
As you implement vulnerability protocols, consider the following nine strategic categories:
1. Asset criticality
Because financial systems and customer data repositories manage sensitive data—such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and intellectual property—they’re examples of highly critical assets. Common assets include the following:
Public-facing resources
Internal systems
Regulation-bound assets (like credit card information that’s subject to the PCI DSS or healthcare data that’s subject to HIPAA rules)
Categorizing your assets helps you prioritize vulnerabilities that could compromise your most significant data or functions. For example, a misconfiguration in a low-privilege S3 bucket isn’t the same as one in a production payments pipeline—identifying the difference requires prioritization.
Map your most sensitive assets and assign them explicit criticality ratings so high-risk vulnerabilities get immediate attention.
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2. Environment type
Environment-specific risks can vary, especially when public cloud configurations expose new types of vulnerabilities. Because of this, your team should prioritize vulnerabilities that affect public-facing resources and assets in the demilitarized zone due to their higher exposure and attack surface. And when it comes to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models, focus on and prioritize resources that are under your domain.
Understanding the shared responsibility model also clarifies which components fall within your control and need protection.
Prioritize vulnerabilities based on compliance obligations since regulatory requirements can vary by geographic locations (like the GDPR for the European Union).
3. Operations dependencies
Critical chain dependencies can elevate the priority of even minor vulnerabilities, such as an unprotected central authentication service. For this reason, be sure to prioritize these vulnerabilities based on their immediate impact and potential cascading effects on operations and services.
Additionally, use dependency mapping to conduct a quicker root-cause analysis when an incident occurs. That way, your security team can visualize your service dependencies to identify hidden risks.
Document and regularly review dependencies between systems to quickly identify vulnerabilities that may disrupt critical business services.
4. Business impacts
Exploited vulnerabilities can disrupt business operations and result in significant financial losses. Vulnerabilities in core business functions—such as ERP systems, payment processing platforms, and CRM systems—merit the highest priority here.
As we’ve seen, you should prioritize assets with requirements from the GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS since noncompliance can result in significant fines and legal consequences.
Incorporating Wiz’s key vulnerability questions can also help you measure remediation and potential gaps that affect your organization. These questions include the following:
How much time do defenders have to respond?
How hard is it to know if there’s a compromise within a product?
What is the direct monetary cost of applying a fix?
Collaborate with business owners to quantify the potential operational and financial impact of each vulnerability and thus enable more informed prioritization decisions.
5. Incident history
Previous security incidents and breaches shed light on recurring patterns when prioritizing current vulnerabilities. Because of this, it’s a good idea to evaluate past remediation actions’ effectiveness to refine your prioritization strategies. After all, lessons from prior breaches often reveal overlooked systemic weaknesses.
By creating a setting for more incident reflection, you can improve your vulnerability management processes for readiness the next time you face a threat.
Track and analyze past incidents to identify recurring vulnerabilities and prioritize fixes for patterns that have led to real-world breaches.
6. Common Vulnerability Scoring System
CVSS is a standardized framework for assessing security vulnerabilities’ severity. It consistently rates high-risk vulnerabilities based on their impact and urgency. Cloud service providers often integrate it into their security controls to optimize their risk-based vulnerability prioritization and management.
However, while CVSS provides standardized severity scores, it lacks context like asset exposure, lateral movement potential, or exploitability.
Apply CVSS scores to vulnerabilities to prioritize cloud risks in a structured manner. But use this only as a stepping stone—don’t overvalue CVSS scores. Instead, incorporate them as one component of your holistic vulnerability prioritization program and use a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) to unify your security for a full picture of potential threats.
7. The Exploit Prediction Scoring System
The Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) is a framework from FIRST that provides a probabilistic assessment of exploitation risk. Its prediction estimates the likelihood that attackers will exploit a given vulnerability over the next 30 days, which helps you prioritize vulnerabilities based on their exploitability rather than their severity.
Additionally, the EPSS improves CVSS by estimating the probability of exploitation over time. If you use them together, you can layer your own cloud environment context.
Incorporate EPSS scores into your prioritization workflow to focus remediation on vulnerabilities with the highest likelihood of exploitation in the near term.
8. Zero trust model and micro-segmentation
Zero trust might not be an official prioritization method, but it supports your program nonetheless. Because the zero trust model forces continuous verification, it inherently minimizes risk. Because of this, you should adopt zero trust principles to verify every access request, regardless of its origin.
You can take your security one step further by dividing your cloud environment into smaller, more manageable segments. By isolating workloads and network segments in this way, you can target vulnerabilities within each more effectively.
Regularly audit access controls and segmentation policies so users have only necessary permissions and attack surfaces remain minimized.
9. Regular updates and adaptation
Staying static with your prioritization process can open you up to new threats in the future. That’s why regularly updating and adapting your vulnerability prioritization framework is essential to reflect the ever-changing threat landscape.
To do this, use feedback from incident responses and vulnerability assessments to refine your prioritization criteria. Then, update your process based on red team exercises, audits, and new business initiatives.
Schedule periodic reviews of your prioritization criteria and update them to reflect changes in your cloud environment and threat landscape.
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Tools and technologies for streamlining prioritization
Security teams continue to face a high number of threats, vulnerabilities, and increasingly sophisticated attackers. For instance, in June 2025, Cybernews announced a shocking investigation of a data breach that exposed 16 billion passwords across platforms like Facebook, Apple, and GitHub. Cases like these remind us of the critical importance of automated security solutions in maintaining continuous, effective cloud security while leveraging contextualization and prioritization.
While consistent real-time vulnerability detection is important, your cloud security solution’s ability to evolve and adapt to novel threats is, too. Below are ways you can prioritize vulnerabilities to save time and prevent a greater impact on your organization’s bottom line:
Vulnerability scanners
Vulnerability scanners help you locate risks across your workloads, systems, and applications. In particular, agentless scanning—which Wiz’s solution provides—rapidly identifies vulnerabilities and provides valuable insights without requiring extensive manual maintenance.
Your scanner should also work seamlessly across systems and applications for a more comprehensive view of your multi-cloud environment.
Making detection easier and more efficient allows you to implement a more thorough shift-left approach. That way, your DevSecOps team can find vulnerabilities before you deploy your applications, which saves you time and money and keeps users safer.
Prioritization platforms
Without prioritization, your team will face overwhelming alert fatigue. This makes it nearly impossible to address the most pressing vulnerabilities first in a sea of new risks. To combat this, effective prioritization platforms consider the threat impact through the lens of your unique business context.
Wiz’s platform, for example, matches vulnerabilities in the following areas:
Cloud configuration
Lateral movement
Identity exposure
These connections help you pinpoint which issues pose the most significant threats in your environment.
Threat intelligence feeds
Along with maintaining security for your organization, it’s vital to assess and understand threats in the wild. After all, any kind of threat that exposes third parties could also affect you.
Alternatively, novel cyberattacks could come knocking at your door in a matter of days or months, which could impact your cloud security management. However, integrating real-time threat intelligence, such as KEV or Wiz’s Cloud Threat Landscape, can inform your team about these critical security issues worldwide.
Your DevSecOps team can also follow key cloud security brands and professionals for discoveries and analyses on the threat landscape. For example, Guy Goldenberg—senior software engineer at Wiz—posted a thread on X in 2025 about CVE-2024-43405:
But here’s the catch: information isn’t useful without context and prioritization. Because of this, you should combine intelligence feeds with a unified cloud platform to gain complete visibility and prioritization in today’s ever-shifting and evolving threat landscape.
Key features to look for in vulnerability prioritization tools
Below are key features to consider when selecting a solution for vulnerability risk management:
| Feature | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Risk-based prioritization |
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| Agentless, continuous scanning |
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| Deep contextual assessments across technologies |
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| Automated prioritization |
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| Visualized reporting |
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| Comprehensive vulnerability catalog |
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| Integrations with existing security tools |
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| Compliance features |
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| DevSecOps abilities |
|
Prioritization in action: A real-world cloud scenario
Imagine that you’re the CISO of a rapidly growing fintech company that’s recently migrated most of its infrastructure to a multi-cloud environment that uses both AWS and Azure services. Here’s what a seven-step action plan would look like after scanning for multiple issues:
Step 1: Discovery and inventory
Your security team conducts a thorough scan using cloud native security tools to identify the following:
A misconfigured S3 bucket in AWS containing customer PII
Unpatched software vulnerabilities in several EC2 instances
Exposed API keys in Azure Key Vault
Overly permissive identity and access management (IAM) roles in both AWS and Azure
The scan generates a list of over 1,000 vulnerabilities, which it initially ranks by CVSS scores.
Real-life example: BMW adopted Wiz to improve its centralization and visibility and protect its sensitive information. During onboarding, Wiz found multiple undiscovered workloads. Now, with a unified account of inventory, BMW can manage and secure its resources more efficiently within one platform.
Step 2: Contextual risk assessment
Your team then assesses each vulnerability’s contextual risk, considering the following aspects:
Data sensitivity: The misconfigured S3 bucket receives a high-risk flag due to the presence of customer PII.
Asset criticality: EC2 instances that are running core financial processing become a priority for critical assets.
Potential business impact: Exposed API keys could lead to unauthorized access and potential data breaches.
Real-life example: Monese, a retail financial services organization, needed a better way to gain full visibility into its AWS environment, so the company chose Wiz as its CNAPP. Now, Monese can empower its small security team with the latest scanning technologies to identify vulnerabilities and remediate potential threats promptly.
Step 3: Threat intelligence integration
By integrating threat intelligence feeds, your team discovers the following information:
A known threat actor who’s targeting financial institutions is actively exploiting the unpatched software vulnerability.
Experts have attributed recent reports of data breaches to misconfigured cloud storage buckets in the fintech sector.
Using real-time threat intelligence tools, your team then identifies vulnerabilities that threat actors have actively exploited in the wild. The solution they select to remediate them should leverage data from global threat repositories, such as the CISA’s KEV, to contextualize vulnerabilities. This empowers them to prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world threat data.
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Real-life example: Thoughtworks, a digital engineering service, adopted Wiz to gain proactive vulnerability identification and mitigation. Using Wiz’s Security Graph and data security posture management, the company gained fuller visibility into its environments and identified possible attack paths.
Step 4: Attack path analysis
Using attack path visualization tools, your team identifies the following issues:
The exposed API keys could allow attackers to move laterally within the cloud infrastructure, where they could compromise both AWS and Azure resources.
Overly permissive IAM roles could allow attackers to escalate privileges and access sensitive data across multiple cloud services.
This analysis underscores the importance of addressing these issues to prevent potential lateral movement and privilege escalation.
Real-life example: Amplitude, a digital analytics solution, recognized its growing cloud environment and sought to enhance its prioritization process by focusing on both short-term and long-term remediation strategies and associated risks. Using Wiz’s Runtime Sensor and Security Graph, it proactively focused on vulnerabilities that posed actual risks in runtime.
Step 5: Prioritization based on business impact
By collaborating with business stakeholders, your security team prioritizes vulnerabilities that could lead to the following problems:
Significant data breaches due to the misconfigured S3 bucket and exposed API keys
Service disruptions due to unpatched critical vulnerabilities in core financial processing EC2 instances
Compliance violations due to overly permissive IAM roles
Real-life example: Siemens, a manufacturing company, struggled with a complex cloud infrastructure. Because of this, the company adopted Wiz to unify its cloud security strategy with direct business outcomes. As a result, Siemens saved on cloud costs by remediating cloud security risks more quickly and increased its cloud visibility from 20% to 100%.
Step 6: Remediation and mitigation
Based on the above prioritization, your team performs the following actions:
Immediately secures the misconfigured S3 bucket and implements stricter access controls
Rotates all exposed API keys and implements a secrets management solution across both cloud environments
Patches the vulnerable software on critical EC2 instances and schedules updates for less critical systems
Applies the principle of least privilege to IAM roles in both AWS and Azure to reduce unnecessary permissions
Real-life example: The company behind Grammarly, an AI writing assistant, needed to improve its speed to mitigate risks, especially as the brand continued to grow. By unifying its security with Wiz, Grammarly can now automate its workflows and streamline remediation and mitigation with 100% coverage across its environments.
Step 7: Continuous monitoring and re-evaluation
Finally, your team implements the following solutions to improve and streamline its monitoring:
Continuous security posture management tools to detect new vulnerabilities or misconfigurations in real time
Regular penetration testing to identify potential attack paths across the multi-cloud environment
Periodic prioritization criteria re-evaluation to align with evolving business needs and the changing threat landscape
Real-life example: OFX, a global transfer organization, needed a way to unify its security using a single platform that also leveraged continuous monitoring. This need placed the company in a reactive mode, exposing it to possible cloud security threats. But after adopting Wiz, OFX improved its SLA to just three days and could immediately respond to zero-day vulnerabilities.
How Wiz prioritizes the vulnerabilities that lead to breaches
Most tools flood your team with high-CVSS alerts—but Wiz filters for real risk and correlates vulnerabilities with attack paths, privilege levels, and exposed assets.
Our platform goes beyond a list of findings. Instead, it shows you where to act, how to fix vulnerabilities, and what to prioritize to prevent a breach. Wiz also scans your VMs, containers, serverless functions, and more to find vulnerabilities and provide contextual insights. By correlating asset configurations, network posture, data sensitivity, and existing vulnerabilities, it makes prioritization possible at a glance.
And because complete coverage is essential, Wiz reports and alerts on both public-facing resources and limited public-facing resources, as well as VMs and containers that are accessible from other subscriptions. Better yet, our agentless approach to cloud native vulnerability management enables you to deploy quickly.
Take our free vulnerability assessment today to discover vulnerabilities across your cloud and improve your organization’s cybersecurity.
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