Today’s organizations rely more and more on software solutions and applications to improve their operational efficiency; these technologies are prone to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyberattackers. While many of them already have in place the tools for detecting and addressing these vulnerabilities, the underlying Vulnerability Management process is often overlooked, resulting in a disavantage in vulnerability response.

In addition to the one posed by process governance, another major challenge in Vulnerability Management is the prioritization of vulnerabilities . Vulnerability scanners do a great job at detecting vulnerabilities, and this leaves security teams with thousands and thousands of alerts to check and issues to address. Luckily, not all of them share the same level of criticality, but this makes determining which vulnerabilities need more attention and in which order a key step of Vulnerability Management. On average, each scan detects 779.935 unique vulnerabilities.

Organizations can’t possibily verify and patch each and every one of them and, without a clear prioritization process, teams struggle to agree upon which vulnerability might pose a greater risk for the business, delaying remediation and wasting precious time. Risk-Based Vulnerability management and business contextualization of vulnerabilities help determine their actual risk level and decide which ones need to be addressed first.