Uplevel to Next-Generation Vulnerability Management with our CISO Guide
Vulnerability management is difficult and not getting any easier. CISOs and security teams struggle to keep their organizations safe from cyber security threats that come from software flaws.
A big part of the challenge is the growing number of vulnerabilities that need to be fixed and the lack of resources available to remediate them.
Ponemon Institute, as part of a vulnerability management study conducted with Rezilion, surveyed 634 IT and security practitioners and found that 47% said their organizations had backlogs of applications identified as vulnerable. More than half said the backlog consisted of more than 100,000 vulnerabilities, and the average number of vulnerabilities in backlogs overall was 1.1 million.
Even more concerning is that more than half of the respondents said they were able to patch less than 50% of the vulnerabilities in the backlog.
Organizations are losing thousands of hours in time and productivity because they’re dealing with a massive backlog of vulnerabilities on both the production and development side of software applications.
To effectively address these challenges, security teams need to improve their vulnerability management efforts. They need to automate processes wherever possible, to accelerate their work and reduce the backlogs. Technology solutions such as Rezilion’s vulnerability management platform can help by automating processes and enhancing software security.
Among the key features of the platform are a software bill of materials (SBOM), an extensive list of the components contained in a software product and information about the components’ dependencies and hierarchical relationships.
To be effective, an SBOM needs to be maintained and updated each time a change is made to an application component. Changes can happen at any time and by any number of sources. An SBOM also allows teams to build a live inventory of all software components at any point in the software development lifecycle; search and pinpoint vulnerable components across billions of files; use runtime analysis to know if detected bugs are exploitable in a specific environment; export and share SBOMs in standard formats; and continuously monitor and update SBOMs.
An agentless solution is another next-gen vulnerability management feature. Agentless allows user connection and access to the platform’s functionality across multiple cloud platforms. The tool lets security teams monitor exploitable attack surfaces in runtime without using an agent, to minimize security and operational risk.
While some organizations might be comfortable with agents, this approach can be an operational risk and add to overhead. An agentless solution can see into the runtime execution of software, which allows it to determine which components are vulnerable and whether they are exploitable in the runtime context.
Automation is another critical component for next-gen vulnerability management. Automation provides guidance and reduces the backlog of software patching. Seek a platform that offers suggested fixes and the best versions available to patch all Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) with the lowest likelihood of disrupting application performance, and then applies the fix for you.
Automatically detect, prioritize and remediate software risk – without an agent – to relieve security bottlenecks and free developer resources to build. That’s how you arrive at best-in-class, next-gen vulnerability management.
To learn more about the next generation of vulnerability management, and how you can achieve it, read our CISO’s Guide to Next-Generation Vulnerability Management today.
