What is a vulnerability management program?
A vulnerability management program is a structured, continuous approach to identifying, evaluating, and mitigating security weaknesses across an organization's IT ecosystem. Well-designed vulnerability management programs not only strengthen an organization's security posture but also provide a systematic framework for streamlining threat prevention and mitigation. This is especially crucial in cloud-native environments, where vulnerability management must adapt to ephemeral resources, CI/CD pipelines, and shared responsibility.
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What makes up an effective vulnerability management program?
Vulnerability management programs consist of four critical components: identification, prioritization, remediation, and reporting. Here’s what each one entails:
Vulnerability identification: Identify cyber risks (such as software flaws and bugs), misconfigurations, shadow IT, and third-party dependencies through continuous monitoring, scanning, and asset inventory.
Vulnerability prioritization: Prioritize vulnerabilities effectively by assessing business impact, emerging cyber threats, and compliance requirements. Your security team can do this using a combination of contextualization, analysis, and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
Remediation: Use modern vulnerability remediation techniques to collaborate and embed security practices during every stage of the software development and deployment process, including continual testing for validation. This shift-left approach enables faster remediation for security patches, updates, reconfiguration of systems, and the implementation of compensating controls when direct fixes aren’t feasible.
Reporting: Leverage cloud-native security tools to synthesize data from various scanning sources and highlight trends and changes over time. You should also use KPIs like mean time to remediate (MTTR), risk reduction over time, and compliance with SLAs.
These management processes can benefit all organizations, regardless of their cloud infrastructure. However, cloud-native environments require a unique set of management practices to protect against modern threats.
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Why vulnerability management matters for cloud-native teams
Traditional vulnerability management falls apart in the cloud. For example, multi-cloud teams can unintentionally expose resources to the public internet through misconfigurations or vulnerabilities, allowing attackers anywhere in the world to access them. Without complete visibility, these exposed and vulnerable assets are easy to overlook.
Cloud-native solutions and processes can holistically protect your infrastructure from today’s cybersecurity threats, which is especially critical given the unique and evolving threat landscape. Here are key elements to consider for vulnerability management for the cloud:
Ephemeral assets, such as containers, serverless functions, and virtual machines, disappear and move quickly. Traditional scans struggle to detect and track these assets, as they often lack the context necessary for effective remediation and prioritization.
Shared responsibility models mean that providers secure your infrastructure, but you remain responsible for your APIs, workflows, configurations, and identity and access management.
Rapid deployment cycles become critical as CI/CD pipelines update environments daily—only multi-cloud automated scanning can find concerns in real time.
Visibility within multi-cloud systems is critical for management. When your team lacks a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) that unifies all your security tools and features, you risk exposing vulnerability gaps.
CNAPPs provide all your vulnerability management needs, enabling you to secure your environments through an efficient and streamlined process. Automation and unification also mean your security team is less likely to make human errors, creating an overall safer cloud.
Benefits of a vulnerability management program
A unified vulnerability management program provides the following advantages:
Reducing risk through proactive security
Streamlining operations with automation
Increasing visibility and improving reporting
Together, these benefits help teams build stronger security that meets compliance standards, including NIST, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, and other industry standards.
A modern risk management program also leverages contextual strategies. Context is the key to effective cloud management. It isn't about just identifying vulnerabilities—it’s about identifying and prioritizing the most critical issues.
For example, a serious known vulnerability in a public-facing application requires immediate attention, but an old vulnerability on a turned-off test server is something you can address later. This cloud-native approach to vulnerability management leads to a more secure cloud for all stakeholders.
Challenges in implementing vulnerability management programs
While there are obvious benefits to a well-managed vulnerability program, implementing and maintaining one has its pain points. Some challenges teams face include:
Organizations can struggle with resource constraints. Keeping pace with the dynamic attack surface of a cloud platform is difficult without dedicated resources and investment in InfoSec, which isn’t always feasible.
Organizations may deal with legacy systems that are difficult or impossible to patch. In these cases, organizations must find alternatives to mitigate security risks, such as network segmentation or additional monitoring.
Organizations often struggle to manage the sheer volume of vulnerabilities. This can be especially challenging in large IT environments, where effective prioritization is non-negotiable. Without it, security teams can quickly become overwhelmed.
How to build a vulnerability management program: 8 key steps
Implementing a new vulnerability management program doesn’t have to be complicated. With the proper steps and solutions, you can introduce a management program that meets compliance standards and secures sensitive data. Consider these eight best practices:
1. Secure executive buy-in and assign clear ownership
Before launching a vulnerability management program, it's crucial to secure buy-in from executive leadership. This ensures the program receives the necessary resources and attention. You can start building buy-in by tying improved cloud security to business goals and values.
Avoid technical jargon when speaking with non-security executives. Instead, focus on business benefits: enhancing brand reputation, avoiding financial pitfalls from breaches, and accelerating a company’s time to market for greater agility.
Beyond winning buy-in, create a culture of ownership. Maintaining accountability and driving consistent progress requires designating a single owner or team responsible for the program's success. This approach ensures that your program moves forward and maintains an auditable record of output.
2. Continuously discover and inventory cloud assets
Next, install automated tools to continuously discover and catalog assets across your network, cloud environments, and development pipelines. Cloud-native tools for agentless discovery across multi-cloud environments help teams maintain an up-to-date asset inventory, especially as ephemeral resources introduce themselves.
Additionally, leveraging API integrations with cloud providers and configuration management databases is key to maintaining an up-to-date inventory.
Establish a tagging system to categorize assets by criticality, business unit, or compliance requirements. This enables more targeted vulnerability assessments and prioritization.
3. Prioritize vulnerabilities using a risk-based approach
As you discover security vulnerabilities, remember that detection is only part of the equation. A high volume of issues can lead to alert fatigue and confusion about which issue to remediate first.
In a Wiz webinar, Karel Kohout, managing director and appsec lead for Accenture, said that “you can have great processes. You can have great tools. But if you throw too much [...] at the engineers, they will get overwhelmed.” He continued, “If we just show [...] a lot of findings, then it won’t work. It’s about [...] prioritization.”
You can achieve prioritization by creating a tailored risk-scoring model that goes beyond CVSS scores to incorporate your organization's specific risk factors and vulnerabilities. For example, include weighted criteria such as data sensitivity, operational impact, and regulatory requirements. This model should be regularly reviewed and adjusted in consultation with business stakeholders to ensure that it aligns with evolving organizational priorities.
When you use this custom scoring system to automatically categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities, teams can focus on the most critical issues first.
4. Automate wherever possible
Part of improving prioritization is eliminating predictable and manual tasks. If you rely on too many manual processes and interventions for vulnerabilities, you’ll struggle to keep up with your cloud environments.
You need solutions that scale as your organization grows, so look for opportunities to automate routine tasks in the following areas:
Vulnerability scanning
Report generation
Routine remediation tasks
Alert triage and assignment to relevant teams
Compliance checks and audit trails
Automation not only saves time but also reduces the risk of human error and ensures consistency in your processes.
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5. Integrate scanning into your broader security stack
Your vulnerability management workflow shouldn't operate in isolation. Integrate it with your existing security tools and workflows to create a cohesive security ecosystem. This integration might include connecting management systems with your SIEM, ticketing system, patch management tools, and DevSecOps pipelines.
Choosing a CNAPP like Wiz as your all-in-one cloud security solution can unify your entire ecosystem through its suite of features and integrations. Wiz Security Graph, for example, can correlate vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, and permissions throughout your environment with risk context.
6. Establish policies and enforce repeatable processes
Once you have a structure in place for your vulnerability management program, establish and formalize a set of guidelines and workflows to ensure consistency and effectiveness. These procedures define how your organization approaches vulnerability management.
Well-defined policies ensure consistency in your approach and provide clear guidelines for all involved parties. Your documented processes should serve as a roadmap for all stakeholders and team members, covering aspects such as scanning frequency, remediation timelines, exception handling, and escalation processes.
Automate policy enforcement with infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code tools. This verifies standards like scan frequency and remediation SLAs within your CI/CD pipelines and configurations throughout the software vulnerability lifecycle.
7. Train teams and build ongoing security awareness
The success of your vulnerability management program relies on the people implementing it. Start by providing comprehensive training for staff directly involved in the program, covering tools, processes, and best practices. You should also conduct broader awareness programs for all employees. They will help your employees understand their role in securing systems and the necessity of promptly reporting potential vulnerabilities.
Improving awareness can be achieved through quarterly training that simulates common threats, such as phishing tests or drills for vulnerability response. These exercises should also clarify roles and responsibilities in real-time emergencies or vulnerability situations.
Additionally, regular training and conversations about cloud hygiene across your entire organization are crucial, covering topics like password maintenance, security for devices and locations, and emerging attack paths.
8. Enforce vulnerability policies-as-code
John Keegan, the head of digital security for the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, tells Wiz how he leverages policy-as-code.
Define your policies-as-code with frameworks and tools like OPA and Sentinel to embed your policies in your CI/CD pipelines. These codified rules automatically drive consistency and enhance security across your environments.
For example, use policy-as-code principles to define rules like blocking public S3 buckets or leveraging vulnerability scanners for container images. Implementing policy-as-code in this way can help prevent common, critical vulnerabilities before deployment or when a misconfiguration occurs.
Metrics to measure vulnerability management success
Clear vulnerability management metrics provide your team with a clear view of what needs to improve and what requires change. Here are some popular metrics for vulnerability management and formulas to calculate them:
Mean time to detect (MTTD): This metric measures the average time your security team takes to detect a vulnerability after it emerges. This helps you find blind spots in detection.
MTTD = (Sum of all detection times) / (Total number of vulnerabilities detected)
MTTR: This measurement helps you track the average time it takes to resolve an issue after detection. You can use MTTR to track how efficiently you patch and remediate issues.
MTTR = (Sum of all remediation times) / (Total number of vulnerabilities remediated)
Average vulnerability age: This calculation measures how long a vulnerability has remained active, from discovery to remediation. This reveals backlog issues and prioritization health.
Average Age = (Total age of open vulnerabilities) / (Total open vulnerabilities)
Remediation coverage: This metric assesses whether your organization’s vulnerability risk has decreased over time. It also reveals any improvements (or setbacks) in your security posture and remediation process.
Coverage = (Total vulnerabilities remediated / Total vulnerabilities identified) × 100
Compliance with SLAs: This compliance measurement focuses on the percentage of vulnerabilities your team has defined and fixed within service-level expectations. You can use this information to analyze your compliance with policies and governing bodies.
Compliance = (Vulnerabilities remediated within SLA / Total vulnerabilities identified) × 100
These metrics provide key visibility into different phases of your vulnerability lifecycle management process and measure how effectively you detect, remediate, and reduce risk.
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How Wiz supports cloud-native vulnerability management
As we’ve seen, a robust vulnerability management program is essential for safeguarding critical assets and enhancing an organization's security posture. At Wiz, we've developed a cloud native vulnerability management solution that addresses the common challenges organizations face when implementing and maintaining effective vulnerability management programs.
Our approach offers the following features:
Comprehensive cloud infrastructure visibility
Contextual risk assessment and prioritization
Agentless scanning
Seamless integration with existing workflows
Continuous monitoring with real-time alerts
Automated remediation recommendations
While implementing vulnerability management can be challenging, it’s worth the effort—maintaining a strong security posture should be one of an organization’s top priorities. With Wiz's all-in-one platform, organizations can build an effective program that adapts to their changing needs and emerging security threats. See the difference for yourself by scheduling a free demo.
Or, to measure your security health today, try out a free Wiz vulnerability scan.
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