Why You Need to Implement Vulnerability Assessment Consulting Services Today

New vulnerabilities can arise in your organization’s environment every day. In recent years, there has been an increase in bring your own device (BYOD) and employees working from anywhere. Organizations do not have the same control of the vulnerabilities that arise as they once did when everyone was working on the same network. Even if your entire organization logs into the same in-office network, cybersecurity threats continue to grow. Hackers have gotten more sophisticated and are constantly searching for vulnerabilities that they can exploit. For these reasons, your organization’s implementation of vulnerability assessment consulting services is critical today. Vulnerability assessments are an important step towards protecting your environment from cyber-attacks. During vulnerability assessment consulting services, the engineer will assess the vulnerabilities within your environment and begin remediating those vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability Assessment Consulting Services: The Basics

The vulnerability management process is a cycle. First, the engineer scans the environment for vulnerabilities, patches those vulnerabilities then rescans. This process continues as a cycle since new vulnerabilities can continue to arise. The goal is that during this process, the security team will find vulnerabilities within an organization’s environment, and patch them before a hacker can take advantage of them. By implementing vulnerability assessment consulting services, an organization is better able to protect its data from a breach. By implementing this process regularly, vulnerabilities are more likely to be found and remediated before they get exploited by an attacker. Vulnerabilities can be caused by outdated software, unsupported software, misconfiguration of software, or a vulnerability within the software that has been downloaded on your system.

The Vulnerability Management Cycle

In the vulnerability management cycle, the engineer first targets the assets that they want to scan. Next, they configure the scan and schedule it. Once the scan is finished, a report will be compiled. The report will be reviewed and checked for false positives and other errors. The team that implemented the scan will then suggest a remediation plan based on the report. Then this process happens all over again. The cycle: scan remediated, rescan, remediate will repeat. The process is ongoing so that threats can be continuously identified and responded to.

Vulnerability Assessments

Vulnerability assessments are often viewed to secure the “low hanging” risk within an IT infrastructure. The test is conducted against internal systems and internal perimeters using a technique that simulates a real-world attack. The internal network test can be tested via a VPN connection. These tests can be automated to scan both the internal and external systems. Implementing Vulnerability Assessment Consulting Services is an important way to gain recommendations quickly for how to best manage the vulnerabilities that exist in your environment.

Vulnerability Management vs Penetration Tests

Within the vulnerability management process, scanning takes place to look for vulnerabilities within a system. The team then uses this scan to take steps towards remediation. A Penetration Test differs because the tester goes into the system intending to exploit the vulnerabilities within the system. The goal of both processes is to eliminate vulnerabilities that could harm an environment, but because of the different approaches, they often have different results. For this reason, many organizations choose to carry out both tests together. Vulnerability Assessments find vulnerabilities that exist while pen tests find which vulnerabilities can be exploited.

Risks Involved with NOT Managing Vulnerabilities

Implementing Vulnerability Assessment Consulting Services is an important way to take a proactive approach to your cybersecurity posture. By finding and patching vulnerabilities before an attack takes place, your organization is better prepared to protect itself from cyber-attack. This is more cost-effective than a reactive approach to security. Companies that do not implement important services such as vulnerability assessment consulting services are often faced with taking a reactive approach to security–having to implement tools and remediation once an attack has already occurred. Cybersecurity attacks are harmful to a company’s reputation and costly to repair. Implementing vulnerability management services regularly helps an organization remain compliant with industry standards such as HIPAA, or PCI. Being in non-compliance can result in fees and a breach of customer confidential data.

Types of Vulnerability Assessment Consulting Services

• Application scans
• Network-based scans
• Host-based scans
• Wireless network scans