Four elements of a successful vulnerability management program

Vulnerability management is part of every organization’s IT security program in one form or another, though it’s often not well defined or matured.

Following are four strategies to consider that could help mature or build your vulnerability management program to produce actionable results for mitigating risk in your organization.

1. Identify the correct metrics
2. Create achievable vulnerability management goals
3. Remediate vulnerabilities with the most impact
4. View your vulnerability management program as an iterative process

1. Identify the correct metrics

Metrics help decision-makers focus on limited resources and understand the effectiveness of their current processes. Metrics are usually born of a question, generally in a review meeting, from a decision-maker. For example, they might wonder how many critical vulnerabilities were remediated last cycle by the workstation team, which would set the analyst to work compiling new metrics for a future review.

Successful metric creation

Every metric should tie back directly to the goals and focuses of the security program. If your goal is to have zero critical vulnerability exposure on external devices, then this should be a metric.

If you have service-level agreements (SLAs) tied to vulnerability remediation, then this should be a metric. If you don’t care about low criticality vulnerabilities in the environment, don’t include them in your metrics. Focus on what will drive action and direct resources.