Organisations cannot afford to fall even one step behind when it comes to the latest in cloud or hybrid network security, lest they become more vulnerable to attacks. Modern NetOps teams today are responsible for many tasks regarding performance and health monitoring, which range from on-site and cloud applications to devices, software, and instances. In addition, malicious threat actors relentlessly attempt to capitalise on the vulnerabilities of large enterprises and small businesses.

These cyberattacks affect organisations from all industries. Gartner’s recent prediction states that by 2025, 45 per cent of global organisations will have suffered attacks on their supply chains. Statista also reports that in the third quarter of 2022, data breaches worldwide exposed approximately 15 million data records, a staggering figure representing a quarterly increase of over 37 per cent. Network attacks are also costly, not just in the figures but also in the lost productivity, frustration, and negative impact that comes with cyber attacks.

The best way to protect against these threats is with vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management (often shortened to VA and VM, respectively), two concepts that are often confused with one another. To significantly improve the security posture of your cloud and hybrid environments, it is essential to better understand their differences and how they relate to one another.

What is a vulnerability assessment?

VA identifies, defines, and prioritises vulnerabilities in IT infrastructures, computer systems, and applications. These vulnerabilities typically belong to either of three categories, namely:

● Software

These vulnerabilities affect the applications an organisation uses in the form of glitches, flaws, or weaknesses in their software code. Patch management and security updates are a must to maintain security.

● Hardware

Hardware includes all the physical devices in the organisation’s network structure, such as routers and servers. They require patches and firmware upgrades to maintain a high level of security, and vulnerabilities arise from failing to implement these upgrades or using outdated devices.

● Human

Human vulnerabilities are caused by user security issues such as leaked or weak passwords or human error (visiting malicious websites, opening dubious links and emails, etc.). This category is the most difficult for NetOps to enforce and control.

Vulnerability assessments scan the organisation’s network for possible issues in the above categories and provide IT teams with crucial insights into the security gaps in the business’s IT infrastructure. Ideally, a VA will also prioritise risks by severity to let your teams know which ones require immediate attention.

Organisations looking to switch from a reactive security approach with firewalls for more proactive measures look to VA as their initial step in creating an improved information security programme.

What is vulnerability management?

On the other hand, vulnerability management is identifying, evaluating, resolving, and reporting vulnerabilities in software and systems. While it seems similar to vulnerability assessment, the key difference is that vulnerability management is an ongoing cycle that includes vulnerability assessment.

Unlike vulnerability assessment, which simply determines and classifies risks to network infrastructures, vulnerability management goes beyond by including decisions on whether risks warrant remediation, mitigation, or acceptance. Vulnerability management also covers general infrastructure improvements and reporting.

Vulnerability management runs on a five-step process cycle excluding pre-work that many organisations adhere to.

● Assess

This is where VA comes into play, and IT teams identify and scan assets and report their findings.

● Prioritise

The reports from the first step are then used to prioritise risks. IT teams will also append threat context to these risks, which requires extensive knowledge of the current threat landscape and how threats could evolve.

● Act

After prioritising the known threats, the teams sort them into remediate, mitigate, and accept categories. Remediation warrants the complete removal of the threat. Mitigation simply reduces the odds of the vulnerability getting exploited by malicious actors in case remediation proves too disruptive or there are no patches available. Threats that fall into the acceptance category are software or devices that will soon be replaced and do not require action.

● Reassess

After processing all the risks based on their final recommendations, IT teams must rescan and revalidate that they have all been remediated, mitigated, or accepted thoroughly.

● Improve

This final phase requires teams to evaluate their metrics and verify their accuracy and relevance to ensure that they are properly assessing risks. Furthermore, this step addresses any other underlying problems contributing to system vulnerabilities.

Benefits of VA and VM

Vulnerability assessments are integral to the vulnerability management cycle, and the cycle itself is a key component of the security strategy of an organisation’s NetOps teams. Businesses today cannot afford to ignore the risks in their networks and IT infrastructure because as they grow in complexity, their teams will face greater difficulties in maintaining network visibility. This provides threat actors with the ideal to exploit overlooked system vulnerabilities. More often than not, risks and attacks slip under the radar until they have caused significant and costly damage to the organisation.

VM offers advantages that go beyond security, such as helping organisations meet internal and federal compliance requirements. Therefore, periodically identifying risks and addressing them via vulnerability assessment and the VM cycle helps businesses keep up with changing compliance requirements and avoid non-compliance penalties.

Conclusion

Given the obvious benefits, it is clear that VA and VM are essential to a business’s digital infrastructure, and yet many NetOps teams still face challenges in implementing these processes. Thus, if you need help to better manage your complex network and stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape, get in touch with us at GROUP8 today. As specialists in offensive-inspired cybersecurity, we provide vulnerability assessment and penetration testing services that empower your teams to tackle security vulnerabilities head-on and optimise your VM cycle. Contact us at hello@group8.co to learn more about our wide range of industry-leading cybersecurity solutions.