What Is Vulnerability Management Automation?
At its core, vulnerability management (VM) is the continuous process of scanning an organization’s digital environment for exploitable weaknesses that could serve as entry points for cyberattacks, reporting and evaluating the findings, and remediating systems to remove detected weaknesses. For vulnerability management to be effective at scale, it must be automated with advanced solutions designed to do just that.
While an individual security professional can run scans and evaluate the findings on their own, this approach yields more inconsistencies and is prone to human error — not to mention that a manual vulnerability management system would simply be too time-consuming to justify.
Automated Vulnerability Scanning Then and Now
Vulnerability management had a smaller scope in its early days but has since expanded to encompass much more than simple CVE scanning. While traditional VM focused only on identifying and resolving vulnerabilities in servers, workstations, and other fundamentals, modern vulnerability management encompasses a much broader surface area — think IoT, cloud environments, and dynamic assets.
As a result, the job of VM is a heavier lift than ever. That's why large, complex organizations need a VM program designed to keep pace with ongoing digital transformation and the evolution of cyber threats. A big part of modern vulnerability management automation is also integrating seamlessly with the other tools in the environment so that nothing is missed.
Why Automate Vulnerability Management?
Automated vulnerability scanning solutions more than prove their worth by doing the heavy lifting of VM to help keep your organization hardened against cyberattacks. They provide the following benefits to organizations across all industries:
Increased speed
Automated vulnerability management solutions scan complex infrastructures and deliver their findings — including analytics that inform risk prioritization and even up-to-date threat intelligence — within a matter of minutes.
Enhanced accuracy
Two cybersecurity professionals may set up a vulnerability scan of the same environment and get two different sets of results due to discrepancies in what is scanned and how. Automated solutions will deliver consistent and comprehensive results every time.
Improved efficiency
The analytics provided by modern, risk-based VM solutions help security teams continuously optimize their processes to become more efficient — including faster time-to-remediation — and track progress toward their goals.
Robust asset coverage
Ever-changing digital environments require automated solutions that can constantly adapt and keep up with the expanding attack surface.
Operational cost reduction
Automated vulnerability management solutions that pack in a lot of advanced features help organizations reduce the number of tools and vendors they use. Remediating vulnerabilities before they can be exploited also circumvents costly breaches, audit fines, and the financial losses associated with reputational damage.
Which Parts of Vulnerability Management Aren’t Automated?
It may sound beneficial to have your VM solution automate the remediation process once it discovers and prioritizes the vulnerabilities on your systems. However, even the most advanced solutions still need oversight and verification by a skilled cybersecurity professional. The manual component of a successful VM program is the verification and oversight process. That isn’t to say there shouldn’t be any automated remediation capabilities present in your VM solution, as a small degree of automatic remediation is warranted.
The 5-Step Vulnerability Management Process
1. Discover
The first step of any vulnerability management system is to ascertain every asset connected to your networks that could pose vulnerability risk — even printers and smart devices. There are two options for how to do this: You can either use an agent-based or agentless. One isn’t better than the other, as there are pros and cons to both. The choice is dependent on your organization’s particular needs.
2. Assess
Once everything on your network is discovered, it must be assessed. This part of automated vulnerability scanning will cross-reference your organization’s assets and systems with an up-to-date account of the current vulnerability exposures that might be present, known as common vulnerabilities and exposures, or CVEs.
3. Prioritize
Next in the process is prioritizing the detected vulnerabilities. Many VM solutions will start by using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which can rank risks based on several metrics like exploitability and potential impact. Advanced solutions will give you the ability to customize your organization’s prioritization, offering granular risk scores with added contextual and risk information to help you fully understand the urgency of each identified vulnerability.
4. Remediate
A powerful VM solution will aid in the remediation process by giving you the exact steps to take to complete the remediation, such as how to apply the appropriate patch or upgrade. This step is the most manual of all, but advanced solutions will remove all the guesswork.
5. Validate
Validating remediations isn’t just good for security — it also helps prove your efforts to regulatory compliance auditors and demonstrate progress to internal stakeholders. Some VM solutions have built-in compliance functionality that shows you how well your systems are aligned with the regulations with which you must comply.
Core Features of Automated Vulnerability Management Tools
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Thoughts: The Criticality of Vulnerability Management
Here's the bottom line: if you're serious about cybersecurity, vulnerability management isn't optional — it's essential. A complete cybersecurity strategy starts with knowing where you're vulnerable, and that's exactly what good vulnerability management delivers.
Ready to take the next step in strengthening your organization’s security posture? Now that you understand the benefits, challenges, and real-world considerations of implementing a vulnerability management system, it’s time to see how the right platform can make all the difference.
Fortra VM
Fortra VM is a proactive, risk-based vulnerability management solution that is crucial to any cybersecurity portfolio. With its robust feature set, Fortra VM assesses and prioritizes your system weaknesses and creates easily understood reporting for efficient and effective remediation. Fortra VM offers multiple subscription types to match your organization's needs, transparent pricing, and unbeatable support. Take the next step and get a personalized quote.