Enterprise vulnerability management: Processes & tools

In today's vast digital landscapes, enterprises face the constant threat of malicious actors ready and able to exploit any minute cracks in their security. Instead of waiting to fall victim to bad actors, enterprises — and smaller companies with long-term growth plans —  should adopt a robust vulnerability management plan that includes best-practice processes and tools. 

Keep reading to discover the critical phases of enterprise vulnerability management processes and the tools that help facilitate and optimize the process.

Vulnerability management at a glance:

What is a vulnerability?

A vulnerability refers to a weakness or flaw present in an IT system, software application, or network infrastructure that can be exploited by an attacker to carry out a successful attack. These vulnerabilities can come from various sources, including coding errors, design flaws, configuration mistakes, or even user actions. Attackers actively search for these vulnerabilities and may exploit one or more of them, either individually or in combination, to accomplish their desired objective.

Often, multiple layers of vulnerabilities are exploited to mount an attack, with vulnerabilities in public-facing assets serving as a gateway to vulnerabilities in assets behind the organization’s firewall.

The growing sophistication of common attacks further complicates the vulnerability landscape; approaches such as phishing, malware, and ransomware exploit poor cybersecurity hygiene practices. And as many as 98% of cyberattacks today rely on at least some form of social engineering, which is very difficult to control since even IT professionals can fall victim to these manipulations.

What is vulnerability management?

Vulnerability management is a strategic, ongoing process that minimizes an organization’s exposure to cybersecurity threats. In larger organizations, vulnerability management typically takes place across multiple teams. The security team is responsible for defining a disciplined set of vulnerability management best practices and procedures while continuously identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities. Operations and development teams are tasked with remediating the surfaced vulnerabilities.

Why is enterprise vulnerability management important?

Enterprise vulnerability management is essential for organizations to:

• Proactively identify and address vulnerabilities

• Reduce risk

• Protect sensitive data

• Comply with regulations 

• Defend against evolving threats

• Build stakeholder confidence 

What are enterprise vulnerability management processes? 

Enterprise vulnerability management processes encompass systematic activities to identify, assess, prioritize, and mitigate vulnerabilities within an organization's infrastructure, applications, and systems. These processes typically include the following key components:

• Vulnerability scanning: Conduct regular scans to identify vulnerabilities across the organization's network, systems, and applications. 

• Vulnerability assessment: Once vulnerabilities are identified, assess them to determine their severity, impact, and exploitability. 

• Risk prioritization: Prioritize vulnerabilities based on their criticality and potential impact on the organization's operations.

• Remediation: Develop strategies and plans to remediate or mitigate identified vulnerabilities. 

• Reporting and communication: Generate reports on vulnerability assessments, risk prioritization, and remediation progress. These reports provide stakeholders, including management, security teams, and auditors, with visibility into the organization's security posture, enabling informed decision-making and demonstrating compliance with security policies and regulations.

By implementing enterprise vulnerability management processes, enterprises can strengthen their security posture, mitigate risks, and minimize the likelihood and impact of security incidents.

What are enterprise vulnerability management tools?

Here are a few examples of enterprise vulnerability management tools currently available. Enterprises must evaluate their specific requirements, such as scalability, integration capabilities, reporting, and compliance features, and then choose the tool or tools that best fit their needs.

• SAST (static application security testing): SAST is vulnerability scanning of source code, bytecode, or assembly code. SAST tools offer protection from security issues such as SQL injection or Cross-site scripting. Scan early in your CI pipeline or as an IDE plugin.

• DAST (dynamic application security testing): Dynamic application security testing is black-box testing that checks your application from the outside. A DAST tool doesn’t require any insights into your application (such as programming language) to test the application. This way, you can improve your application security even when using niche programming languages.

• SCA (software composition analysis): SCA is a type of security tool for managing open source components. With SCA, development teams can quickly track and analyze open source components brought into a project and all related components, their supporting libraries, and their direct and indirect dependencies. The scanning process generates a software bill of materials (SBOM), providing a complete inventory of a project’s software assets. SCA tools can also detect software licenses, deprecated dependencies, vulnerabilities, and potential exploits.

• ASPM (application security posture management): ASPM tools bring together data from different application security tools to provide additional visibility and context about the vulnerabilities found in other tools, enabling risk based prioritization and remediation.

• Security intelligence & vulnerability databases: Vulnerability scanners require knowledge of known vulnerabilities in order to identify and provide prioritization of vulnerabilities in an organization’s environment. There are several well-known public vulnerability databases and standards that vulnerability scanners rely on, including CVE, NVD & CVSS. Third party services like Snyk's Vulnerability Database collate a variety of trusted data sources to provide additional context about vulnerabilities
  

Enterprise vulnerability management with Snyk

Experience comprehensive and developer-centric enterprise vulnerability management with Snyk’s innovative security solutions for open source libraries, containers, infrastructure as code (IaC), and source code.

Ready for complete enterprise vulnerability management and coverage? Learn about Snyk’s SAST, SCA, ASPM, container, and IaC security features and see developer-first security's impact on release velocity by booking a demo with a security expert today!

Enterprise vulnerability management FAQ: