Why is vulnerability assessment important? Why do you need it?

Comprehensive vulnerability assessment provides security teams with critical insight into weaknesses in their IT infrastructure and overall network. Vulnerability assessment allows security teams to properly manage and patch vulnerabilities that pose risks to the network, protecting organizations from threat actors and the possibility of a breach.

A network breach could have far-reaching consequences, starting with the months (if not years) it may take to identify all affected assets, and extending to the reputational impact to your organization. Vulnerability assessment should be performed routinely to ensure proper security of your network, in addition to penetration tests (more on that later).

Understand risk across your network with vulnerability assessment

Vulnerability assessment is a core operation for security teams, and is usually the best way to get an initial idea of how vulnerable a network is to an attack. Vulnerability assessment is required for many compliance frameworks, such as PCI and HIPAA, and enables penetration tests to be smarter and more targeted as compared to using simple port scans. Most importantly, it’s the foundation of creating a proactive information security program, moving beyond just reactive measures like firewalls.

Actionable vulnerability assessment is key

When conducting vulnerability assessment, what you do with the data is often more important than the data itself. These days, every vulnerability scanner can detect critical vulnerabilities among the majority of OS types and systems. Turning that raw data into actionable intelligence is a bigger challenge; when you get thousands (if not millions) of vulnerabilities after a scan, how do you know where to start?

Vulnerability assessment also touches every level of a security organization. From your CEO’s laptop to intricate SCADA control systems and web servers, it’s important to accurately assess every piece of your network for flaws that hackers can use to break in. This means that scanners need to not only have a breadth of vulnerability coverage, but also the ability to recognize sensitive systems and scan them accordingly without bringing down the network. Since vulnerability assessment covers your entire network, you also need to be able to communicate results and action plans to stakeholders across your organization–from system administrators to CISOs.