Five Ways to Reduce Your Vulnerability Response Anxiety

Learn how to get ahead and reduce stress around IT vulnerabilities.

As someone who has held nearly every position within IT, I can tell you that vulnerability remediation is one of the most challenging tasks. The arduous work of sifting through months of email, spreadsheets, and Slack messages searching for solutions, to the heightened anxiety of an audit revealing unsuccessful remediations, poor vulnerability management can exacerbate stress and create an atmosphere for potential breaches.

Conquering the Vulnerability Response (VR) woes is possible, and I have helped many organizations do the same! Here are five hard-earned best practices when assisting clients in conquering their Security Operations Vulnerability Response.

1. Centralize remediations!

Streamline email and spreadsheets to manage remediations. ServiceNow VR recreates email and spreadsheet processes into a single source of truth. Workflows stay the same, and everything is in one place, eliminating time mismanagement.

2. Group remediations!

Frustrations over ungrouped task assignments can generate undue stress. With ServiceNow VR, remediations group by type, service area, VLAN, or any useful data in the CMDB. Assign batches of remediations at a time, saving valuable hours in a day!

3. Build a communication bridge for the entire organization.

Communicate regularly with people outside of your department or area of expertise often. Colleagues offer untapped insight and may facilitate the process of remediating the organization's vulnerability response. ServiceNow VR lets you connect more readily with the entire organization to unlock that potential.

RELATED: Paychex improves its Security Operations with help from ITS Partners & ServiceNow.

4. Formalize accountability.

Implementing Now VR formalizes the accountability process. Establish accountability channels between cybersecurity and other teams through a single owner for specific vulnerabilities on specialized systems. Centralizing the owner of Vulnerability Response avoids confusion as to whom is responsible for implementing tasks.

5. Generate reports for executive visibility.

Curtail anxiety around VR by increasing visibility. Keep senior management and executives involved by maintaining visibility into the managed work. Tackle remediations, generate level-of-success reports, and share them with your management team regularly.

Implementing these five best-practices will gift your vulnerability management team more time to focus on improving SecOps defenses and minimize stress around managing your VR!

Learn more about our Prescriptive Vulnerability Response offering.