Security & Compliance Blog Multi-Cloud Blog

Vulnerability Remediation – to the Cloud and Beyond!

2 minute read
Allison Cramer

Understanding and managing risk

Security teams often use a variety of vulnerability management and response tools to assess and address the vulnerability situation across the organization, frequently using different sets of tools for different environment types. This often makes getting a single picture of the current risk profile difficult as they try to stitch together various views. To the eternal frustration of all parties involved, the output from many of these tools is nearly incomprehensible to the operations team who are charged with fixing the issues identified. They either receive reports that use different reference points than they are able to track, or an endless stream of tickets with no easy way of determining impact or priority. The net effect is that organizations are left exposed. BMC helps customers remove barriers to action with solutions such as BMC SecOps Response Service, which enables them to rapidly prioritize and remediate risks based on policy. This is done by importing vulnerability scan data to provide a single view of all vulnerabilities, and then enhancing that information with critical operational information to drive action. This makes it much easier for security and operations teams to understand the full spectrum of vulnerability information and provides each team with a tailored view to enable them to better understand their progress at any given point in time. In very plain English, this means the security team knows they have not been ignored and can see exactly how the operations team has consumed and planned the work. From the operations’ team perspective….well it gives them a fighting chance by removing the manual and repetitive efforts.

Building context for better decisions

Understanding the context of a vulnerability is one of the most important pieces of information needed to establish priority. In addition to understanding the number of vulnerabilities, their age, and their severity level, we need additional information in order to make more informed decisions. This includes knowing which assets are affected on the network and what type of data or business services might be exposed as a result of the vulnerability. Other important data points are whether a patch is available and when it can actually be deployed. BMC SecOps Response Service provides significant contextual information around each vulnerability. This includes better information to uncover the potential impact of the vulnerability, as well as the availability of any known fixes, such as patches, that can be used to remediate it. This enables security and operations teams to focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most, while providing a streamlined and effective way to quickly remediate vulnerabilities and turn intelligence into action.

Operationalizing vulnerability management for better security

Integrating vulnerability with remediation data can greatly help in producing a standard and repeatable process that will reduce the time between identifying a high severity vulnerability and effectively remediating it.

BMC SecOps Response Service enables organizations to operationalize their vulnerability management strategies to speed remediation and reduce the attack surface. SecOps Response Service enables operations teams to take action and remediate vulnerabilities across services spanning multi-cloud and on-premise datacenter environments. It helps break down the silos when multiple patch tools, such as BMC BladeLogic Server Automation and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), are being used across multiple platforms. The result is a closed-loop vulnerability management strategy that helps security and operations teams accelerate and track their progress in addressing vulnerabilities over time. This ensures organizations have consistent methods and processes and are focusing on the highest risk vulnerabilities as they work to find and remediate the full spectrum of security risks.

For more information visit https://www.bmc.com/it-solutions/truesight-vulnerability-management.html

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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

Allison Cramer

Allison Cramer joined BMC in 2015 and serves as Senior Director and Head of Strategic Marketing & Thought Leadership. Prior to BMC, Allison was Director of Product Marketing for Continuous Delivery at CA Technologies playing a lead role in DevOps. Before joining CA, Allison held leadership positions at Dell and Cummins.

She began her career in the consulting industry with Arthur Andersen and BearingPoint with a focus on Federal Government. Allison earned her MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and has a BSBA in International Business from American University. She is also very involved with Girl Scouts of America and Autism Awareness.