As more businesses move their organisations to the cloud, they are exposed to new threats. One of the top threats is exposure to cyber security threats. Effectively combating these threats will require businesses to establish an adequate security strategy, and vulnerability management is essential.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is a term that encompasses the ongoing process of identifying, reporting, and neutralising security risks on the cloud platform.
Cybersecurity breaches are always imminent, and organisations must be on guard against them. Vulnerability management puts you ahead of the game by ensuring that you identify and remediate risks before they become a threat to your cloud platform.
Best Vulnerability Management Practices to Adopt In 2023
Vulnerability management can be challenging to figure out with so many practices out there. We’ve compressed it and outlined these five top vulnerability management practices you should adopt this 2023.
Stay Up To Date On New Vulnerability Management Practices
Vulnerability management tools and practices are updated frequently to match the new threats. Being updated on these new practices and tools is part of ensuring your team is ready to keep your platforms safe.
Apart from new tools and practices, staying up to date also involves data gathering. Utilise every intelligence source for a broader scope of security risks and a higher percentage of accurately remediating them.
Set up KPIs
You can improve the efficiency of vulnerability management in your organisation by setting key performance indicators. These KPIs measure how effective and successful your vulnerability management practices are. Keeping track of these KPIs helps teams adjust and work on areas that may be slacking. It also improves the vulnerability management program.
More than just measuring how successful vulnerability assessment practices are, choose these metrics to highlight and prioritise remediation of the core systems and applications.
As a guide, consider choosing KPIs that highlight risk awareness, audits, planning, and resource allocation.
Some KPIs used by other companies include:
- Risk Score;
- Service Level Agreement (SLA);
- Rate of Recurrence;
- Average Time to Action;
- Average Vulnerability Age;
- Total Risk Remediated;
- Average Time Taken to Remediate;
- Asset Inventory.
Maintain a Log Monitor To Track Threats
The burden of vulnerability management doesn’t fall on one team, depending on the organisation’s size. Some organisations are small enough to have one team working on it. In contrast, others are large enough to have multiple teams handling their vulnerability management.
Proper communication across teams and team members is essential regardless of the group you fall into. You can increase efficiency and remediation success rates by adopting a seamless communication method that ensures everyone is on the same page. An easy way to do that is by maintaining a log monitor.
The log monitor serves as a central vulnerability management platform that everyone can access and refer to when carrying out their tasks.
Put An Incident Response Plan In Place
The job of a vulnerability management team is to discover and avert risks to the cloud platform. However, some security breaches will still occur. When that happens, the team’s success is measured in the time it takes to remediate the threat.
In essence, the vulnerability management team should be ready to hit the ground running in the event of any cyber security breach. Such quick response times would be impossible to attain if the team doesn’t already have a response plan in place. So, outline an incident response plan in place and go over it until it’s implementable and sustainable.
Keep Frequent Scans
Scanning for security risks and cyber threats should be done as frequently as possible to identify threats as they come up. Organisations must revamp their chain of command to ensure that core practices like regular scans and logging can occur seamlessly.
After each scan, organisations should compile reports and maintain logs to highlight risks for early remediation. Scans should be scheduled and followed by reports and remediation.
Conclusion
Security breaches will happen, but organisations can significantly reduce their occurrence by adopting the best vulnerability management practices. These practices don’t just reveal security risks; they also remediate them to improve the security of the organisation’s cloud platform. You can upgrade your vulnerability management team by adopting these best practices discussed above.
