Your vulnerability management program plays a significant role in keeping your network secure and running smoothly. It outlines how IT will identify, prioritize, and remediate the vulnerabilities hackers and other bad actors may exploit. Of course, having a process in place and executing it are two different things, and sometimes finding the time to put a plan in motion is harder than it looks.
When IT has too much on its plate, vulnerability management may be deprioritized in favor of other, more urgent tasks. But the longer you put it off, the more likely it is that vulnerabilities remain unpatched, creating an ever-growing attack surface.
If this scenario sounds familiar or is something you want to avoid, outsourcing your vulnerability management to a vulnerability management as a service (VMaaS) may be the best solution for your company and security team.
What Is Vulnerability Management as a Service?
Vulnerability management is a proactive approach to cybersecurity. It’s the ongoing and continuous process of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities in your network, infrastructure, and endpoints.
Many companies have an in-house IT or security team to oversee and execute the process. However, in-house vulnerability management isn’t practical or possible for every business. Some businesses have far too much infrastructure for IT to keep track of, and smaller companies may not have enough time to devote to the process. When that happens, the company may outsource its vulnerability management program to a third-party vendor.
Types of Vulnerability Management as a Service Programs
Like any software as a service (SaaS), vulnerability management services allow you to be as hands-on or as hands-off as you like, giving you the level of control you’re most comfortable with.
Platform-Led Vulnerability Management as a Service
For teams that want a lot of control over their vulnerability management program, platform-led vulnerability management services are often the ideal solution. The vendor gives you access to the tool, but your IT or security team does a majority of the work.
The vendor helps you install and configure the necessary components on your organization’s network. But they handle the tool’s maintenance and updates as well as host everything on their systems. Automated scanning happens on your schedule and categorizes critical vulnerabilities according to your internal risk assessment framework, giving you complete control over prioritization and remediation.
Co-Managed Vulnerability Management Services
A co-managed VMaaS is when you and the vendor share more of the responsibilities. Like the platform-led model, the tool is installed on your organization’s infrastructure, and the vendor handles maintenance and updates, as well as scanning and flagging vulnerabilities.
However, in a co-managed model, once the vulnerability is identified, built-in security tools and threat intelligence reports help your IT team categorize which vulnerabilities may be critical to your business. Using this information as guidance, your team can more efficiently and effectively prioritize which vulnerabilities to remediate first.
Fully-Managed Vulnerability Management as a Service
For companies that don’t have the resources for an in-house vulnerability management program, a fully-managed VMaaS program is often the best choice. It’s a complete outsourcing of your vulnerability management program, which puts the vendor in charge of monitoring, prioritizing, and remediating all of the security vulnerabilities the tool identifies.
How Does Vulnerability Management as a Service Work?
No matter which type of VMaaS tool you choose, they all work similarly and are structured just like your in-house vulnerability management program. However, automated vulnerability management services often free up your team for other tasks by handling the routine tasks of your vulnerability management process and providing you with actionable intelligence and insights that keep your network secure.
Asset Identification and Monitoring
You can’t protect something if you don’t know it exists, so the beginning of any vulnerability management program is identifying all of your assets. Everything from an endpoint to a server to third-party software is scanned and inventoried, giving you insight into not only what hardware and software you have but how it's configured. This baseline scan gives you a starting point in identifying where your most critical security vulnerabilities are and helps you put together a plan to remediate them.
Many VMaaS tools handle this step, conducting a scan for you, then supplying you with an inventory list. However, VMaaS tools don’t do one scan, then stop. They continuously monitor your assets, updating the inventory list as endpoints are added or software is deprecated, giving your team instant and up-to-date insights about every item on your network.
Vulnerability Scanning
A crucial part of the vulnerability management lifecycle is ongoing vulnerability scanning to identify new and emerging threats. Ongoing could mean continuous, but it could also mean daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly, depending on your needs and attack surface. Like an in-house process, these scans help identify security threats and gaps in your network — anything from a misconfigured endpoint to a missing security patch.
A VMasS tool does this autonomously, on a set schedule, and with your configurations. While it’s true your in-house team can use a vulnerability scanning tool to handle most of the work, a VMaaS tool can do the scanning outside of normal business hours and when usage is low, so it doesn’t interfere with daily operations.
Prioritization
In addition to automated scanning, VMaaS tools will often leverage additional information, like threat intelligence reports, to provide recommendations and suggestions once the scan is complete. Not only do they flag security vulnerabilities, most also include an analysis of each threat, even if you’ve opted for the most hands-off approach.
The additional insights and intelligence help your team adjust their decision-making process, even when they have a solid, risk-based approach to managing vulnerabilities.
Remediation
Depending on the type of vulnerability management service you opt for, remediation may be handled by the vendor, the end-user, or both.
Teams that use a more hands-off method for managing vulnerabilities may take information from the tool’s threat intelligence, apply that information to their internal risk-assessment plan, and then remediate the security vulnerabilities on their own. However, tools that handle more of the vulnerability management process may also provide remediation guidance, ensuring the latest security patches are deployed and installed correctly.
Ongoing Monitoring
Finally, like an in-house vulnerability management program, a VMaaS provides ongoing monitoring and support. Fixes are monitored and validated, while the tool can track your progress in reducing your attack surface or complying with regulatory guidelines. Likewise, some VMaaS tools provide additional services, like penetration testing, to discover new or unknown security threats when you add new software.
Common Vulnerability Management as a Service Challenges
While VMaaS can free your IT department to attend to other tasks, outsourcing your vulnerability management isn’t something to be taken lightly. Like any type of outsourcing, there are certain nuances you should be aware of before committing to any provider.
Roles and Responsibilities
Clarifying who is responsible for what is important in any vendor relationship. Without that alignment, tasks may be overlooked, and vulnerabilities may not be patched. The tool generally handles the day-to-day tasks, like scanning the network and identifying new assets. But your in-house team is often still responsible for prioritization, remediation, and execution.
If that division isn’t clear or your in-house team is relying on the vendor for everything, they may lack the critical insights they need to make informed decisions.
Trust
Some teams resist outsourcing critical security work to a third-party vendor, and with good reason. They may worry about their ability to control what the tool does or override decisions the vendor makes. Likewise, they may be concerned about the vendor’s security practices and what would happen if they were hacked. Some companies work with sensitive data and may worry that the vulnerability management tool oversteps its bounds, scanning sensitive data without taking precautions to safeguard it.
Not a Panecea
One of the promises of outsourcing vulnerability management to a third-party vendor is that it can increase operational efficiency and reduce the amount of work IT has to do. However, this may not always be the case. Regular vulnerability scans combined with multiple threat intelligence sources can reveal a lot of security loopholes and possibly critical threats that your organization may not be able to remediate immediately. These revelations could overwhelm your team and create more work instead of lightening the load.
Why Vulnerability Management as a Service Is Important to Your Company
While you can have an in-house vulnerability management program that gets results, switching to a VMaaS may yield additional benefits for your company.
Enhances Efficiency
Traditional vulnerability management programs can be slow, often because of the manual work involved. Switching to VMaaS takes some of the administrative burden off of the team, freeing them up to work on high-impact tasks. For example, instead of conducting the regular vulnerability scans themselves, IT outsources it to the tool and knows it’s handled.
Improves Patch Management Process
With increased efficiency comes improved performance across parts of the vulnerability management lifecycle. Automating multiple parts of the process improves how quickly things are remediated. For example, as quickly as vulnerabilities are identified, they can be patched, reducing the risk it’s exploited.
Makes Auditing Easier
Many industries have to comply with legal and regulatory guidelines for vulnerability management, which often means providing audit logs and other documentation as proof of compliance. Most VMaaS tools automatically generate and produce the documentation you need with automated recordkeeping, instead of relying on manual logs and recordkeeping, which can be incomplete.
Scalable
Finally, many VMaaS scale with your company. As you grow, so does your attack surface. Adding endpoints, servers, or allowing remote access gives bad actors more opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities. Using a VMaaS service ensures you’re staying ahead of evolving threats and keeping your network secure.
When to Consider Moving to Vulnerability Management as a Service
Small companies, lean teams, and new businesses usually rely on in-house staff for their vulnerability management program. It’s cost-effective and generally works because a small number of employees usually means fewer endpoints and less infrastructure, making managing vulnerabilities and remediating them relatively simple to integrate into IT’s workflow.
However, as a company grows, it becomes difficult to keep managing vulnerabilities in-house, even if you add more IT staff. Additional endpoints, servers, and infrastructure broaden the attack surface, making it more difficult to defend against new vulnerabilities. As new staff leave and others depart, tracking and managing your inventory becomes more complex, and endpoints can drift out of compliance with your security configurations, which represents a real threat. So, when should you consider moving to VMaas?
Limited Internal Resources
Vulnerability management is a continuous, ongoing process, which means IT must devote a certain amount of attention, time, and expertise to it. Even with additional staff, finding the time to do regular vulnerability scans to identify, prioritize, remediate, and test every vulnerability and patch may be difficult, even impossible, as other tasks may compete for attention.
When vulnerability management and security tasks are being delayed, deprioritized, or handled inconsistently, it may be time to shift some or all of these responsibilities to a VMaaS to ensure vulnerabilities are patched and security risks are eliminated.
Prioritization Difficulties
A larger attack surface means you're facing additional security threats, often more frequently than before. While this is expected, the sheer amount of critical findings may overwhelm the team. If they lack a clear method of risk assessment and prioritization, or what they have in place doesn’t seem to be working, they may have trouble executing the remediation phase. What’s more, outside stakeholders may ask the team to explain or even defend their choices, and trying to explain risk assessment to a layperson may not work out as planned.
Switching to a VMaaS can alleviate many of these concerns. Most VMaaS have threat intelligence reports your team can leverage as part of their risk assessment process, helping them determine which vulnerabilities are critical and which ones can wait. These reports have the added benefit of being data-driven, supporting the reasoning behind which patches are deployed and which ones are deferred.
Gaps in the Process
Identifying security risks is only the start of the vulnerability management process. Remediating them is the next critical step. And though risk assessment and prioritization help your team decide which tasks to tackle first, a large gap between identification and remediation could mean your team is overwhelmed, underresourced, or both.
Automated scanning and remediation can do some of the heavy lifting for your team, reducing the time it takes to patch critical and even less critical vulnerabilities.
Supports Compliance Requirements
As more companies collect sensitive data — everything from home addresses to credit card numbers to passwords — government bodies are requiring more and more industries to secure this data, often with official regulations. Compliance with these regulations requires continuous monitoring, documents, and proof of remediation, something a VMaaS tool usually builds right in.
Adaptiva Helps You Automate Vulnerability Management
Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch solution helps you automate and streamline key aspects of your vulnerability management program. Integrating OneSite Patch with other vulnerability assessment tools helps your team leverage real-time threat intelligence reports and turn that into prioritized patching and remediation. What’s more, this happens autonomously, freeing IT to handle the tasks that really matter while Adaptiva handles the rest.
Learn how our solutions can bridge the gap between detection and remediation to transform a slow, manual process into a scalable, automated vulnerability management program. Schedule a demo today.
