With any software, vulnerabilities can arise due to bugs, improperly secured firewall rules or multiple other reasons. If attackers succeed in exploiting these vulnerabilities, it could result in system disruptions and serious damage to your organisation.
Do you know how strong your vulnerability management system is? Is it effective? Can it be considered successful? Let’s be honest, if you’re not measuring KPIs for vulnerability management, your system is pretty pointless.
Successful vulnerability management enables your business to meet compliance requirements, achieve framework goals and defend against security breaches. However, to manage vulnerabilities securely, you have to measure the right metrics.
In this article, we will examine five key metrics that will help you track and evaluate your vulnerability management system.
Let’s get started!
1) Scan Coverage
Your vulnerability management process would not be complete without scan coverage. Scan coverage is an important metric that gives a qualitative view of scan completion.
Through scan coverage reports, you can check if you have comprehensive scan coverage for assets and applications. Moreover, you will be able to track and address risks as soon as they enter your system.
Scan coverage reports have important information about the types of scanning conducted, coverage analytics of business-critical assets and applications and the type of authentication offered. In these ways, monitoring scan coverage helps clarify the scope of risks.
2) Vulnerability Age
The time a known vulnerability lives in a computing environment before a security team mitigates the risk is known as the vulnerability age.
Typically, the longer a vulnerability remains in an IT environment, the more expensive the attack could be. The number of attacks or the potential number of attackers rises as the vulnerability age increases, as the environment may be more prone to attacks. As such, the time and costs required to handle such attacks will also increase.
Tracking this vulnerability management metric helps your organisation create remediation plans that ideally align with your SLA.
3) Time to Remediation
Time to Remediation is a vulnerability management metric that measures the average time taken to fix vulnerabilities once identified.
Based on your risk appetite, you need to define a target time interval for planning fixes, remediating and managing vulnerabilities. You could also use advanced security and vulnerability management tools to gain important insights. Then, you could use automated remediation to fix vulnerabilities and mitigate any attacks as quickly as possible.
Time to remediation is a metric that provides various key points of data. For example, the average time to resolve a vulnerability, the number of users affected by a security breach, how fast security teams resolved an issue, etc. Alongside providing essential data, it also helps improve your security posture rating.
4) Patching Rate
Patching refers to the process of addressing security flaws by adding patches or upgrading your software to the latest version. In fact, there are multiple patches released by software teams to fix bugs and other common vulnerabilities. To stay updated and as secure as possible, you need to apply these patches regularly.
By measuring your patching rate, you can understand how many patches were applied to resolve unknown or undetected vulnerabilities in your software. Furthermore, through this vulnerability management metric, you can also find out how much time security teams took to apply a particular patch.
5) Risk Score
Whenever you encounter an issue, its severity is automatically calculated using your scanner and classified as Critical, High or Medium. However, if you decide not to patch a specific vulnerability or multiple vulnerabilities during a specified time, this is labelled as acceptance of risk.
As such, your risk score is a vital metric that allows you to evaluate and prioritise potential security weaknesses within your network. Your risk score considers multiple factors like vulnerability severity, the likelihood of exploitation as well as the potential impact on your business.
By calculating risk scores, security teams can prioritise their remediation efforts more effectively. Consequently, they can focus on critical issues first to mitigate the biggest threats to your organisation.
Contact Redpalm For Vulnerability Assessments and Managed IT Services Today!
With the increasing prevalence of cyber threats alongside strict data regulations, you need to identify and address vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. To keep your organisation and its networks in top condition, consider choosing Redpalm as your cyber security partner!
At Redpalm, we provide managed IT services and cybersecurity solutions to help you safeguard your business against cyber threats and assess and manage vulnerabilities.
Based in Northampton, our IT experts are Microsoft-certified and equipped with all the knowledge, expertise and skills to mitigate risks and resolve vulnerabilities as soon as possible.
We also offer services like hybrid IT management, incident response, proactive monitoring, IT audits and health checks to ensure all your business operations are running smoothly.
To learn more about our services, click here or contact us to schedule an appointment today!
