Integrating Vulnerability Management Tools with Your Existing Security Infrastructure

Managing vulnerabilities in security and network infrastructure can be a complex and exhaustive task, but integrating vulnerability management solutions can solve for challenges that may arise during security incidents and help prevent disruptions.

It requires careful planning and execution to harden defenses and establish a strong security posture. But why should you do this in the first place? Let's discuss that, explore the obstacles to integrating vulnerability management into security infrastructure, and review best practices for integrating security tools and practices.

Why Integrate Vulnerability Management Tools: Objectives For Integration

Complete risk visibility

Vulnerability management tools help you to uncover vulnerabilities, and prioritize them based on their potential for exploitation. This way, you not only know where the gaps in your defense exist, but you’re also able to sift through thousands of findings and work on the most urgent patches.

Team alignment

Vulnerability management tools and PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service) platforms like Siemba enable you to onboard all stakeholders onto the same platform, with granular visibility into service ownership. This helps everyone collaborate more effectively and take a more deliberate approach, saving you and your team the immense time and frustration of allocating remediation tasks, tracking resolutions, and following up on tasks.

Faster remediation

By prioritizing vulnerabilities based on potential impact, and creating workflows, you effectively streamline and oil up your remediation machinery so that it runs with minimum friction.

You can expect faster remediation as a direct outcome of this move that only becomes an option when you integrate vulnerability tools with your overall security infrastructure integration.

Risk posture reporting

Centralized dashboards help measure and manage security activities continuously, providing a clearer picture of how safe your organization really is. This contrasts with a one-time pentesting exercise, which offers only a point-in-time view of your risk posture. Instead, centralized dashboards give you a near real-time view of your security posture, allowing you to present these insights and your risk posture to your C-suite and other key stakeholders.

Security practices involve continuous learning and improvement through team autonomy, fast feedback, high empathy and trust, and cross-team collaboration. This ongoing process is supported by advanced reporting. Modern end-to-end vulnerability management tools and PTaaS platforms like Siemba offer sophisticated reporting capabilities that enable you to highlight risks and track remediation progress effectively.

To underline: The actual goal of integrating vulnerability management tools is to enable continuous threat detection and management, helping to proactively identify and address threats before they can be exploited, rather than exposing yourself to them.

Defining The Struggle: Obstacles to Vulnerability Management Integration

Who wouldn’t want the ongoing risk visibility, team alignment, faster remediation, and one-click reporting promised by vulnerability management tools? So what’s stopping security teams? Let’s look at the top roadblocks:

Lack of visibility

To integrate vulnerability and security management tools effectively, you need information about your entire network and all the systems within it. However, organizational silos can make achieving this organization-wide visibility challenging, or even impossible. Systems, stacks, and dependencies not listed in the asset inventory, and therefore not covered by pentests, cannot be thoroughly examined for vulnerabilities.

Insurmountable scan data

Even when IT, compliance, and security teams gain visibility into the entire organizational network infrastructure, the sheer number of vulnerability findings can be an obstacle to remediation. This is particularly pressing with Zero-Day threats, which require swift action for two main reasons: first, the vendor has a limited window to release a patch because the vulnerability can be exploited by attackers; another, you need to remediate vulnerabilities quickly to prevent them from being exploited within your own systems.

To address this proactively, vulnerabilities need to be validated and prioritized so that the appropriate security patches can be deployed. Vulnerability management tools can be very helpful in validating thousands of findings within a matter of days.

Dissent/ objections to downtime

Businesses need infrastructure up and running all the time. However, vulnerability scanning and consequent pentesting tend to cause the following issues:

1) The scanning and testing activities themselves cause latency

2) Maintenance windows (which translate to system downtime) are needed for remediation exercises

These might be seen as obstacles to business continuity, and in a sense, that’s exactly what they are, even if the associated actions are critical.

Reactive approach/ check-box attitude

Generally speaking, business leaders and security professionals can sometimes slip into a false sense of security when things are running smoothly without any visible glitches or attacks. It's easy to fall into the trap of doing the bare minimum when it comes to vulnerability management and overall security—just enough to check the compliance boxes or satisfy client SLAs.

If any of this resonates with you, you might be tempted to throw in the towel on vulnerability management tools altogether. But let's face it, that's like leaving your doors and windows wide open for attackers. Thankfully, the best practices we've outlined below can help you overcome these hurdles and build a truly resilient security posture.

5 Best Practices: Roadmap For Integrating Vulnerability Management Tools With Security Infrastructure

1. Develop (and maintain) an asset inventory

This one is obvious, but many overlook the critical fact that this inventory list needs to be up-to-date and comprehensive. One way to achieve this is to create workflows that ensure that no asset, system, or network can merge with your existing infrastructure without being added to the list and undergoing necessary checks, scans, and other security measures (including basic actions like 2FA).

Don’t stop there. Develop a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that tells you how assets relate to one another.

Additionally, don’t forget to reconcile your asset inventory with the scope of your vulnerability management tools and processes to ensure that all systems that need to be secured and scanned are within scope.

2. Add context to scans from vulnerability tools with pen testing and vulnerability enrichment

Vulnerability scanning is only the first step in strengthening your security posture. In fact, the thousands of vulnerabilities uncovered often present more of an obstacle to remediation. Unless, of course, there was a way to rank findings by their potential for exploitation. Pentesting can help you achieve this critical prioritization of threats.

Testing a mobile app for vulnerabilities and gaps in security? Read our blog on best practices for mobile app pen testing.

3. Add further context to vulnerability tool info with threat-hunting

Don’t stop at vulnerability scanning or even at pentesting. While pentesting reveals potential gaps in your defense, threat hunting identifies who has already infiltrated your environment and what activities they are engaging in. It focuses on the current state of your security.

4. Leverage automation

When you automate vulnerability scanning with tools like Siemba, you reduce team bandwidth spent on vulnerability identification, prioritization, reporting, and remediation. Automatic vulnerability scanning can also drive quick action in emergencies.

For example, a security team might quarantine at-risk systems from the remaining internal network, giving themselves the time to deploy the necessary security patches.

5. Pro tip: Report findings frequently

Procuring budgets is never easy. But you can overcome this hurdle by being proactive in making a case for security budgets by displaying impact and ROI. You want to showcase vulnerabilities scanned, threats caught, and remediation made. These indicators are a measure of your effort and output. With security incident exposure and management tools, reports are just a click away.

Conclusion

The question shouldn’t be how to integrate security tools, but how to strengthen your security posture overall. You’re on the right track if you’re thinking about integrating vulnerability management with your security infrastructure. Siemba can help you uncover vulnerabilities, conduct pen testing, validate pen testing findings, prioritize your most high-risk threats, and manage remediation workflows. All with 90% less effort from the team, and immense cost-savings. Contact us for a free demo today, and get serious about vulnerability management.