Does your vulnerability management process help you automate patching and remediation? If not, you’re probably wasting time and money chasing vulnerabilities.
More and more vulnerabilities are being discovered and released each year, which means the need for remediation is growing as well. If your organization is still relying on manual processes, there’s no way you can stay ahead of them all.
And yet, many organizations continue to use a process that is inherently flawed. Most systems automate scanning and alerting but then handle remediation as a separate step.
Alerts are important but are quite limited in their usefulness. They don’t always give you all the information you need to remediate the problem, let alone take away the burden of fixing the problem. Depending on the scale of your organization, remediation still often involves painstaking manual processes. And until the problem is remediated, you’re going to keep on receiving those alerts.
At the very least, in the face of today’s rise in vulnerabilities, keeping all your assets secure is far more difficult without automation—and it’s easier than you might think to introduce.
But first, why are there so many vulnerabilities today? Let’s find out why this number keeps going up every year, then look at ways your organization can harness automation to create a full-circle approach to not only help you stay on top of vulnerabilities but stay ahead of them as well.
Why Is Today’s Software More Vulnerable?
According to the CVE tracking database, the number of discovered vulnerabilities in 2021 will likely exceed those from 2020 by at least 12% (CVEs, or common vulnerability exposures, are tracked on an industry-wide list of known security flaws).
There are a few reasons why today’s software is more vulnerable:
- Code is more complex (microservices, distributed architectures, encryption, etc.).
- Code is often reused in new environments, with unpredictable security results.
- Secure code standards and best practices are absent (such as adopting a shift-left approach and DevSecOps).
Also, alarmingly, many exploits today become public before they are even published on the CVE list.
Knowledge Is Power
When it comes to assessing security, there’s no doubt that knowledge is power. But you also need a cure, not just the raw data. That’s why integrating remediation capabilities as an extension of your current vulnerability scanner output is critical.
The more knowledge you have, the greater the edge you have over attackers. There are many solutions out there that bring together as much knowledge as possible:
- Current threat intelligence from numerous sources
- Merged information from multiple vulnerability databases
- Ingested data about assets and endpoints
But all the knowledge in the world, by itself, won’t help you close your security gaps. First, you have to harness those insights with effective tools to help you remediate the vulnerabilities themselves.
With Tighter Integration, 1+1=3
A recent Gartner market guide for vulnerability assessment indicates that “For large organizations, automation plays an important role in achieving timely remediation.”
This may be the understatement of the year. In fact, without integrated, automated remediation, you may find it impossible to resolve issues on time. By introducing a vulnerability scanner that integrates patch automation features, you’re creating an equation of 1+1=3.
With today’s growth in vulnerabilities, you need to do more with less. So a solution that incorporates remediation and vulnerability scanning lets you fix vulnerabilities more efficiently—and quickly.
The Gartner market guide concludes that “Organizations should evaluate and leverage remediation automation from more tightly integrated products.” Such solutions provide a full-cycle process of scanning, alerting, and remediating:
Threat intelligence is only one piece of the puzzle; an automated, full-circle approach gives you more. For instance, using data to help you plan a patch rollout for the greatest possible success rate and providing automated assistance in rolling out remediation steps at scale.
Again, finding vulnerabilities is only a small part of the effort; remediating them is a far bigger piece. With a combined solution, you’ll improve your business’ operation in a number of ways:
- Minimizing security risk and breaches
- Instilling operational excellence
- Eliminating manual effort and human error
JetPatch helps you pull together all the important aspects of your patching program and introduce automation to save time and money. JetPatch is a modern vulnerability remediation platform that offers risk assessment, vulnerability awareness, and full-featured risk remediation.
And to help you stay ahead of the vulnerability timeline, it doesn’t wait until vulnerabilities are released as CVEs. As soon as patches are available through vendor repositories, JetPatch connects to those repositories in real time so you can prepare an immediate response.
Automated remediation assistance is a major step toward organizational maturity when it comes to security. JetPatch gives you all the intelligence you need to make it simple.
