How to Actually Reduce Risk in Your Environment

How to Actually Reduce Risk in Your Environment

What is a vulnerability risk management program?


A vulnerability risk management program is imperative at any organization to secure assets, but how do you actually reduce risk in your technology environment? In order to understand how to reduce risk in any organization, you first have to understand the vulnerability risk management process. Vulnerability risk management programs have to encompass five basic steps:


Visibility
Assessment
Prioritization
Remediation
Tracking and Reporting

Step one, visibility, involves instrumenting all the assets in your environment. This is actually a challenging step, because beyond connecting to traditional onsite assets like hardware and employee desktops, you have to include cloud providers such as AWS, account for ephemeral assets like containers, connect to virtual machines like VMWare, and account for traveling laptops.


After visibility is established, it’s time to assess them all for risk. The hard truth that inevitably surfaces from the assessment stage is that there is always going to be more risk in your environments than you will ever be able to remediate.


However, once you’ve accepted some level of risk, you can begin the process of prioritizing vulnerabilities based off of the level of risk they pose to your organization. This process requires you to take into account traditional methods such as CVSS scores, as well as identifying what attackers are really after. With this understanding, you can determine what attackers are most likely to take advantage of so you can prioritize where to focus your attention.


Prioritization leads to the heart of r ..

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