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July 15, 2021 - TuxCare PR Team
Vulnerability management tools are a broad and wide category, but all have the same goal: helping organizations to minimize the risk posed by everyday IT vulnerabilities. Though every tool offers a different feature set, there are nonetheless common qualities – and desired qualities.
In this article, we outline what vulnerability management tools can do for your organization, and point to some of the qualities you should look for in a vulnerability management tool – taking into account our recent TuxCare survey results.
Content: 1. Introduction to vulnerability management 2. Vulnerability management as a toolset 3. The capabilities you will commonly find in Vulnerability Management Tools 4. Features that should be present in the ideal vulnerability management tool 5. Automation is at the core of a good vulnerability tool
Vulnerabilities have been a part of the technology landscape for decades. Errors or design flaws in software and hardware make systems vulnerable to exploitation by malevolent actors.
In managing vulnerabilities, security teams would look to close the vulnerability – removing the opportunity for threat actors to exploit it. There are different ways of eliminating a vulnerability, depending on the root cause. Remediation can involve a patch to remove a flaw in software, for example, or changing a system configuration to close a security risk.
In the past, sysadmins could manage these vulnerabilities on a case-by-case basis, but the number of vulnerabilities exploded to the extent that manual vulnerability management just isn’t an option today.
By illustration, in the early 1990s, just a handful of vulnerabilities were reported to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Yet by 2020, it becomes clear that this number is trending towards 20,000 reports per annum. Every year thousands of brand-new vulnerabilities are topping up a vast existing catalog.
It’s impossible to guard against such a large volume of vulnerabilities manually, so tools are required to automate the process. Vulnerability management also aims to make the process more efficient – ensuring that only vulnerabilities that are a real risk are flagged and providing a way to prioritize vulnerabilities according to threat level.
The complexity of today’s enterprise IT environment means that there is no single vulnerability management tool that will manage all types of vulnerabilities across your entire IT estate – even though some tools essentially act as “suites”, combining a wide range of vulnerability management capabilities in one place.
Choosing the right tools will help you run more efficient vulnerability management operations – ensuring tighter security, while also minimizing the drain on your staff.
For example, most organizations will need a network vulnerability scanner to ensure network security is up to scratch. Similarly, you’ll need a tool that monitors your third-party applications for vulnerabilities and that suggests the best way forward. Yet another range of tools provide a birds-eye view of your vulnerability exposure via dashboarding – going as far as to combine the output of several vulnerability management tools in one place.
A good vulnerability management solution should be capable of accomplishing three goals – and to support these goals with automation. First, your tool should be able to detect vulnerabilities on the attack surface it is designed to scan. Next, it should deliver a report and prioritize these vulnerabilities for remediation: not every vulnerability requires urgent action.
Finally, your solution should help you to fix vulnerabilities – instead of requiring your team to manually remediate vulnerabilities, your vulnerability toolset should automate many of these tasks.
Accomplishing the above mix of goals requires a range of capabilities – each targeted to a specific subset of your IT infrastructure – networks, applications, cloud.
We provide an example listing of capabilities you should be looking for and you’re unlikely to find all of the following capabilities in a single vulnerability management tool. However, once you’ve built an arsenal that includes a couple of the better tools in the market you should find that you’re covered for most of the following features:
These are just a few of the practical capabilities that you should expect from your vulnerability management tools, but your organization’s unique IT requirements will undoubtedly pose unique demands on vulnerability management.
The above is a good list of technical features but, in our recent survey on the state of vulnerability management in the enterprise, respondents pointed to features that users would like to see in vulnerability management software – many of which are focused on the more practical aspects of vulnerability management.
To this list, we can add a few more points. Overall, we’d expect an effective vulnerability management tool to deliver high levels of automation. While automated scanning and detection is in place in most tools, we’d also like to see more automation when it comes to mitigation: from automated prioritization of vulnerabilities through to automated patching.
Finally, given the continuous push-pull between secure operations and available operations, we’d like to see a better effort in balancing availability and continuity against security prerogatives.
Vulnerability management tools are a cornerstone of your cybersecurity arsenal. Mitigating vulnerabilities reduces the opportunities for attackers to take advantage of gaps in your cybersecurity defenses.
The more of this you can automate, the more time your security teams have free to spend on more strategic cybersecurity measures. However, automation should not come at the price of opacity: a good tool should be transparent in the way it works.
You can read our full report on the state of vulnerability management in the enterprise here. Want to know more about how live patching can help you automate your security operations? Check out TuxCare live patching product page.
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