No Alert Holidays With SanerNow

It’s the holiday season, and sysadmins need a break too. Mike and Robert, friends and senior sysadmins in two different companies, were on holiday with their families. While Robert was relaxing, with his phone far away, Mike was a wreck. Glued to his phone, he was checking pings and alerts from his subordinates and his vulnerability management solution about a critical vulnerability in the news. It was terrifying, and he was rightfully anxious. But he was also surprised by Robert’s carefreeness and the lack of alerts on his phone.  

“But how does Robert do it?” Mike wondered. And SanerNow was his answer.

 

Robert’s Alert Free Holiday with SanerNow

SanerNow, Robert’s vulnerability management program, is an integrated vulnerability scanning tool and vulnerability remediating tool. An advanced vulnerability management program with a sophisticated set of features that automates and simplifies the vulnerability management process. From the exhausting task of detecting vulnerabilities to the tedious task of remediating them, SanerNow can perform each of them.

 

With its continuously updating vulnerability repository, SanerNow can instantly detect new threats. Then SanerNow can either automatically remediate it if a fix is available, or you can mitigate the risk at a later time.

But more importantly, in SanerNow, you can set up alerts for a multitude of events. From the detection of vulnerabilities to out-of-compliance devices, SanerNow can send alerts.

 

But How do You Minimize Alerts?

Alerts should be used judiciously. Low-criticality vulnerabilities do not need alerts, so it is important to pick and choose what to be alerted of. So, a key thing to remember is that the number of alerts depends on what events you have set the alert for. Be it a new vulnerability, a non-compliant device, or a missing patch.

But how do you ‘actually’ minimize alerts? With automation, of course!

A feature that not only reduces alerts but also provides a slew of benefits.  And SanerNow utilizes automation to efficiently mitigate security risks and significantly reduce alerts.

With frequent automated vulnerability scans, new vulnerabilities do not go under the radar. This also avoids piling up vulnerabilities if the scans are sporadic, leading to a lesser frequency of alerts.

Additionally, automating vulnerability remediation ensures you don’t miss patches in your devices as well. As a consequence, the alerts in case of missing patches reduce as well.

 

Best Practices in SanerNow to Reduce Alerts

• • Smartly Prioritize Alerts: As previously mentioned, alerts should be optimally set. SanerNow provides you with complete customization to pick and choose the alerts you need. It’s always suggested to set alerts for the detection of:
    • Critical and high threats
    • Out-of-Compliance devices
    • Missing critical patches
    • Event/Action failure (ex: failure to scan or patch etc.)
    • Event/Action Success(ex: successful patch or scan )
    • • New device in the network

Other events and actions might not be very critical to deserve alerts, which in turn helps reduce the total number of alerts.

• • Act and Automate: Automating actions significantly reduces alerts, and SanerNow is capable of automating vulnerability management. From vulnerability scans to applying patches, automating them by creating a simple workflow can reduce alerts by multiple folds. So, whenever a new vulnerability is detected by SanerNow, instead of sending an alert, SanerNow can fix it. Automated patching of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security risks provides the added benefits of additional security as well.

• • Employ Alert Thresholding: If a particular low-priority event occurs once, the response to the event can be postponed. But if the same event occurs repeatedly, it must be looked at. This is alert thresholding, and it can help you reduce alerts and improve security as well.

 

Conclusions

Like the boy who cried wolf, too many alerts can make us lethargic and not take quick actions in case it was a false alarm. But with an automated tool like SanerNow, responding to vulnerabilities becomes faster and easier.

Alerts are a necessary evil for robust security, but they shouldn’t ruin your holidays too. And just like Robert, you too can relax.

With SanerNow, of course!

??SecPod wishes you merry Christmas and a happy new year!??