Vulnerability Management Services
Minimize Exploitable Security Weaknesses Across Your Operations
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management refers to the process of discovering, classifying, prioritizing, remediating, reporting and responding to software and network security vulnerabilities. Identified vulnerabilities may be remediated in several ways, including patching, software reconfiguration or security policy updates.
A security vulnerability is a flaw, weakness or error found within your security program that could be leveraged by a bad actor to compromise your network.
You Must Minimize Exploitable Security Weaknesses Across Your Operating Environment
New vulnerabilities in your IT ecosystem arise every day. But not all vulnerabilities are created equal. Most exploited vulnerabilities are already known by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident.
Most companies adopt a reactive posture, attempting to stamp out vulnerabilities as soon as they’re discovered. But this “Whack-A-Mole” approach just leaves your security teams overworked, frustrated and perpetually behind. Instead of trying to patch everything, you need to focus on those vulnerabilities that present the greatest risk to your organization.
That means analyzing and prioritizing those vulnerabilities based on risk-based remediation and data-driven metrics tied to your business objectives to minimize unnecessary patching and downtime.
Not all vulnerabilities
are created equal
Management Lifecycle
Organizations will always need proactive defenses — but vulnerabilities with known fixes are still the source for a significant number of breaches.
With Optiv, you’ll rely on a vulnerability management process built to support continuous improvement. You begin with discovery to analyze your current state and identify critical data, assets, and objectives to set a clear baseline. Then you’ll prioritize Optiv recommendations for triage and program execution. Based on vulnerabilities you’ve prioritized, your Optiv team will execute the appropriate services for remediation.
The final phase validates progress and directly compares results against your established baseline. You’ll get clear, consolidated reports that outline revised recommendations and lessons learned.
This lets you continually tweak your vulnerability management program for constant, incremental improvements.
What Are Some of the Most Common Security Vulnerabilities?
- Insider threat
- Unpatched or out of date software
- Weak or missing authorization credentials
- Missing or poor data encryption
- Misconfigured systems
- Precarious resource management
Security vulnerabilities could be within:
- Your governance program (ownership, documentation, threat and vulnerability detection, information sharing, risk management)
- Your technology (network, wireless, host and application processes and tools)
- Your scanning processes (network, wireless, host and application scanning)
- The organization remediation process (the program tracking and metrics)
Optiv’s Unique Vulnerability Management
Optiv Vulnerability Management Services are designed to ensure your mitigation processes constantly improve. Here is a breakdown of the Optiv vulnerability management process.
Discover
Analyze Your Current State of Vulnerability
Current-state analysis is a critical foundation for vulnerability management. In the discovery phase, you’ll identify important data, assets, and owners to set a baseline.
- Current vulnerability state
- Relevant processes
- Environmental factors
- Key stakeholders and contacts
- Strengths and areas for change
Prioritize
Prioritize Recommendations for Execution
The ability to prioritize your findings is a core feature of effective threat and vulnerability management. Each discovered vulnerability presents a remediation cost, both in time and risk. In this phase, you’ll prioritize the next steps based on a combination of factors like criticality of the asset, vulnerability type, and threat intelligence, so you know where to focus your efforts first.
- Process recommendations
- Triage of vulnerabilities
- Roadmap for program execution
Remediate
Execute the Right Remediation Services for Remediation
This phase focuses on the recommendations and roadmap delivered in the previous phase. You choose which remediation services you’d like Optiv to execute.
- Advice on recommendations
- Remediation guidance
- Client education
- Root-cause analysis
- Status reporting throughout program execution
Validate
Compare Results Against Expectations
The last phase is validation, which allows you and your Optiv team to ensure that the corrective action taken succeeded, that the results met expectations and that suggestions for future program improvements are documented.
- Final report to compare results to baseline
- Consolidated remediation information
- Key takeaways
- Revised recommendations
Related Vulnerability Management Insights
At Optiv, we understand the challenges your organization’s security operations face — and we’ll work with you to improve your security posture and mitigate risks.
Vulnerability Management Migration
Optiv helps you migrate to a new vulnerability management (VM) platform while staying focused on your business.
Vulnerability Management Program
Optiv’s vulnerability management program assesses your organization’s ability to identify vulnerabilities while maintaining critical operations.
Accelerating Vulnerability Remediation
In this paper, we describe a methodology for transforming vulnerability management to reduce the MTTR.
Vulnerability Management Consulting Services Guide
Optiv vulnerability management consulting helps improve the effectiveness of existing processes, procedures, workflows, solutions and overall program.
Cybersecurity Field Guide #4: Best Practices for Automated Vulnerability Remediation
This field guide explores the current state of vulnerability remediation and provides guidance on emerging automated solutions.
Speak to a Vulnerability Management Expert
Contact us and together we’ll design and implement a program that reduces your organization’s risk by evaluating exploitable vulnerabilities while simultaneously supporting the availability and integrity of your critical business operations and data.