What is vulnerability management in modern service management?

Key Takeaways

• Vulnerability management is a structured framework for detecting, assessing, and remediating security threats.

• Vulnerabilities are prioritized based on their potential impact and exploitability

• ITSM plays a key role in vulnerability management

• Creating a standardized playbook, automating repetitive tasks, and using operational metrics can optimize vulnerability management.

Security vulnerabilities can have a significant impact on organizations, resulting in data loss and downtime. Vulnerability management plays a crucial role in cybersecurity, helping organizations identify and remediate security vulnerabilities.

Without a clear process for addressing vulnerabilities, teams may struggle to understand which risks need immediate attention and which can wait. Learn more about vulnerability management and why it’s so important for ITSM teams.

What is vulnerability management?

Vulnerability management is a structured process for identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating security weaknesses in an organization. This is a continuous process, which means vulnerability management isn’t complete once you’ve identified and remediated a handful of weaknesses. Continuously identifying and preventing threats helps your organization stay protected in the long term.

Why does vulnerability management matter?

Vulnerability management and incident response become increasingly important as the number of cybersecurity threats grows. With the integration of SaaS, cloud, and distributed teams, your attack surface grows, increasing your organization's risk.

Regulatory and governance pressure are important factors, too. Vulnerabilities can expose you to regulatory risk, especially when data is compromised by a security threat.

Unresolved vulnerabilities also pose operational risks, and the resulting downtime and data loss can cost you a lot of time and money.

The vulnerability management lifecycle

The vulnerability management lifecycle provides a clear picture of how vulnerabilities are managed from start to finish.

1. Discovery

Teams use scanning tools, environment monitoring, and asset visibility to identify potential vulnerabilities. Identifying these vulnerabilities before they impact your organization is vital.

Fragmented tooling can present discovery challenges, making it difficult to manage findings from several different tools. Using a unified tool for discovery makes it easier to keep threats organized so they’re easier to manage.

2. Assessment

Before you begin prioritizing and remediating security weaknesses, you need to assess them. Vulnerabilities are commonly evaluated in three ways:

• Risk scoring: A numerical value is assigned to vulnerabilities based on their severity, exploitability, and impact.

• Contextual analysis: Contextual analysis helps weed out less important vulnerabilities by determining if they’re exploitable in a given environment.

• Exploitability factors: This measures the likelihood of a particular weakness being exploited based on the complexity of the attack, the availability of the exploit, and the network.

3. Prioritization

Once you’ve identified and assessed vulnerabilities, you need to prioritize them. Vulnerabilities are prioritized based on risk, balancing business impact with technical severity to determine which vulnerabilities require remediation work first.

Competing operational priorities can make this step difficult. It’s important to collaborate across teams to determine which vulnerabilities have the highest potential impact and need to be remediated.

4. Remediation

The next step is remediation, where you actually address the vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are addressed through patching, configuration changes, or compensating controls, which reduces the amount of crisis management work you have to do.

It’s important to coordinate across multiple teams to remediate risks, ensuring vulnerabilities are fixed without interfering with operational readiness.

5. Verification

After going through the remediation process, it’s important to verify that vulnerabilities have been remediated. Validation scans play an essential role in determining whether vulnerabilities have been mitigated. At this point, it’s also important to document your actions for compliance and update your list of vulnerabilities as needed.

It’s important to track security risks throughout the vulnerability management lifecycle. Incomplete tracking or premature closure can result in partially resolved vulnerabilities that still pose a threat to your organization.

6. Reporting

Over time, it’s important for organizations to monitor their risk posture and analyze changing trends. This involves scanning and penetration testing, reviewing security controls, developing a risk register, and looking at how changing cybersecurity trends might impact your business.

Reporting has a significant impact on governance and long-term process improvement. Reports help you optimize your risk posture and fine-tune vulnerability management processes that play a vital role in terms of cybersecurity.

Why vulnerability management often breaks down

While vulnerability management is an effective strategy for bolstering cybersecurity, it doesn’t always work properly. Here are some of the common reasons vulnerability management breaks down:

• Detection outpacing operational capacity: Detecting threats is a key step in vulnerability management, but you need to be able to address those threats. If detection outpaces operational capacity, you’re not addressing all the vulnerabilities you identify.

• Unclear ownership: When team members change or you can’t determine which teams are responsible for a vulnerability, it can result in unresolved vulnerabilities that still pose a threat to your organization.

• Disconnected workflows: Workflows spread across several disconnected systems makes it difficult to collaborate and resolve vulnerabilities.

• Inconsistent prioritization: Improperly prioritizing vulnerabilities means teams can end up focusing on less important fixes first, leaving crucial threats lingering.

• Limited progress visibility: Visibility is a key part of understanding the status of each vulnerability, so a lack of visibility can make tracking and resolution difficult.

The role of ITSM in vulnerability management

ITSM plays an essential role in vulnerability management, making it easier to discover and manage security threats.

Turning security findings into operational work

When you detect a vulnerability, it’s important to get it resolved as quickly as possible. ITSM connects detection outputs to structured remediation workflows, helping vulnerabilities move smoothly from discovery and assessment through remediation and verification. 

Standardizing remediation processes across teams

Service management platforms simplify intake, prioritization, and tracking to standardize the remediation process across teams. This ensures everyone is following a structured remediation process, which means you don’t have to worry about unresolved vulnerabilities or a lack of tracking.

Driving accountability and coordinated response

Assigning ownership, deadlines, and escalation paths improves remediation outcomes by keeping teams accountable and allowing teams to collaborate to develop a coordinated response to vulnerabilities. Remediation is simplified when teams know who’s responsible for what, when remediation needs to be completed, and who to escalate vulnerabilities to if necessary.

Improving visibility into risk posture and progress

ITSM software provides increased visibility into the risk posture and progress through centralized dashboards and reporting. This helps organizations monitor risk reduction and gain a better understanding of their risk posture and what needs improvement or change.

How Jira Service Management supports vulnerability workflows

Jira Service Management (JSM) is an excellent supporting tool for vulnerability management. Jira automates intake from security tools, transforming detected threats into structured tickets. JSM also applies prioritization and SLA-driven workflows to streamline vulnerability management.

Since JSM gives teams real-time visibility into the status of vulnerabilities and remediation, it also empowers IT, security, and engineering teams to collaborate to effectively resolve issues.

Jira also connects remediation and change management processes, which simplifies the process of changing IT infrastructure and code. Plus, it provides reporting on remediation progress and risk trends to give you a comprehensive picture of your risk posture and the potential threats your organization faces.

Best practices for vulnerability management

Following vulnerability management and ITSM best practices helps you simplify cybersecurity and protect your organization.

• Align security and service management workflows: Aligning security and service management workflows makes every step of the vulnerability management process easier. Detected threats are automatically converted to tickets and teams have clear visibility into remediation progress.

• Standardize remediation playbooks: When different teams are trying to run different remediation playbooks, the results aren’t always pretty. Creating standardized remediation playbooks ensures everyone is on the same page.

• Prioritize based on business risk and exploitability: Some vulnerabilities are highly exploitable and highly impactful, and those are the risks you should focus on remediating first. Less impactful or exploitable risks can be fixed after mission-critical ones.

• Automate repetitive coordination tasks: Automating repetitive tasks with ITSM software can help you save time and reduce human errors, which means you can spend more time focusing on cybersecurity as a whole.

• Measure remediation performance with operational metrics: Using incident management KPIs and other operational metrics is a simple way to measure remediation performance, which also helps you figure out how you can improve on your remediation process.

Operationalizing vulnerability management at scale

Vulnerability management is one of several crucial aspects of cybersecurity, but it’s not as simple as you might think. Organizations that operationalize workflows reduce exposure more consistently, so standardized processes are key.

Jira Service Management can help you streamline vulnerability management from detection to remediation and reporting.