Closing the Ever-Widening Gap Between Vulnerability Scanning and Patch Management

Security risk management is a complicated and time-consuming affair. Organizations spend many resources to ensure all their business operations and data are running and stored by risk-free assets. Patch management tools are the most common tools to manage and mitigate risks. You scan, detect and regularly fix your IT assets to keep the IT network free from vulnerabilities. 

However, the number of vulnerabilities is always on the rise each year. Research suggests that vulnerabilities in 2020 exceed the number of vulnerabilities in 2019.  With these challenges closing in fast on organizations, vulnerability management must evolve into a smarter and more effective approach. This is possible with a vulnerability management software.

The most common network attack points are endpoints such as computers, laptops, and servers. They run multiple software applications, opening up many opportunities for vulnerabilities to pop up almost every day.

Vulnerability scanners are used to scan each asset and detect vulnerabilities lurking in it. The scanners fetch security intelligence data from vulnerability databases and compare them against the endpoints under scanning. When you detect a vulnerability, the scanner reports it. 

The detected vulnerability is then assessed and prioritized, along with other vulnerabilities discovered in endpoints. Security teams consider multiple factors and analyze data to assess the true risk to their environment. After they are prioritized, the next stage is remediation.

No, not in the majority of cases. Studies indicate that an IT team on average, takes 67 days to close a discovered vulnerability in their environment. Once you disclose the vulnerability, the clock starts ticking. You will never know how or when, or who will exploit the vulnerability. Hackers get faster and better at exploiting a vulnerability, causing more easy and widespread damage as a vulnerability grows older.

The leading cause of delays in remediation is ineffective patching tools and methods. After vulnerabilities are triaged and prioritized according to their risk levels, security teams must take up patching activities immediately. However, the actual process is more complicated and time-consuming. A security professional visits vendor sites correlates the vulnerabilities, downloads the patches, manually installs and tests them on groups, and then deploys them on devices in the live environment. 

In some cases, teams use patching tools to deploy the patches across multiple devices in one swift action. But the wide range of heterogeneous platforms and softwarelimits most patching tools. They limit themselves to either specific operating systems, third-party applications, or types of devices. 

All these challenges call for a more integrated security risk management approach that allows security teams to track a vulnerability from scanning to patch deployment. 

A tool that draws a straight line through all the stages of vulnerability management increases the risk management process’s efficiency and reduces delays in mitigation to an enormous extent. With integrated vulnerability detection, assessment, prioritization, and patching features you can detect and remediate vulnerabilities easily.

Here’s the ideal situation a security team would love to experience through one vulnerability management tool. 

1. Vulnerability scanners constantly scan the asset inventory for vulnerabilities without any prompting or management.
2. Detect and report vulnerabilities to the security team immediately.
3. The tool automatically assesses and prioritizes the vulnerabilities based on multiple risk factors specific to their environment.
4. After the security team gives the signal, the tool automatically downloads patches from different vendors.It then tests the patches on specific groups, and schedules automatic deployment on the devices.

SanerNow Integrated Vulnerability and Patch Management is a cloud-based tool perfect for handling vulnerabilities across all your heterogeneous endpoints. It supports all devices that run on Windows, Mac, Linux operating systems. You can perform vulnerability scans across entire networks in under 5 minutes. The tool leverages our homegrown, world’s largest vulnerability database with 100,000+ security checks that give you maximum detection accuracy. It also smartly prioritizes all the detected vulnerabilities based on internal and external risk factors. You can take mitigation steps immediately by initiating the patching process.

Sign up for a free demo. We’ll show you integrated vulnerability and patch management in action.