Gain Back Your Peace of Mind with Vulnerability Response from ServiceNow

How to quickly and easily mature your organization's vulnerability practices. 

Ensuring the IT security of your organization, your customers, and vendors can be a nerve-wracking dilemma. Security is not only your issue; it’s the responsibility of every person who uses technology in the organization. One weak link, and just like the companies you’ve seen on the news, you are scrambling to gain back security, control, and your reputation.

Thankfully, that doesn’t have to become your reality. As IT practitioners, we’ve guided hundreds of companies through implementing ServiceNow solutions, including Vulnerability Response. In this article, we’ll give you a plan for gaining back your VR peace of mind.  

1. Understand what you are up against.

If your organization is like others, chances are it’s challenging to identify every IT solution and asset that can be a security vulnerability. Working with multiple departments, their leaders, and potentially hundreds or thousands of users means that gaining real visibility across the entire organization is an incredibly complex and challenging task. These departments are often siloed and are not always thinking holistically about IT and security.  
 

While identifying the complexities can be a burden, understanding them is essential as you look towards creating an effective vulnerability response. Knowing what you are up against is half the problem, as they say. Begin by identifying the various elements blocking you from gaining an accurate picture of your IT solutions and assets.

2. Create a system of collaboration. 

The next step is to create a system of departmental collaboration to help gain an accurate picture of your IT solutions and assets:

• Identify the key stakeholders and their respective departments.
• Communicate a clear vision for the importance of secure IT systems and cast a vision around how their future will improve if they buy in with you.
• Collaborate with the stakeholders to create a complete picture of your IT solutions and assets.

As you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, right. This is a huge undertaking,”...and you would be right to think so. But it’s worth it. The peace of mind that comes from having air-tight SecOps is second to none.

The great news is that you don’t have to do it by yourself. With ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Response, there’s a collaboration tool that will automate and organize this process for you.

3. Make a plan to increase your visibility.

As we’ve partnered with organizations like yours, we’ve learned four questions to keep IT professionals up at night:

• What are the most significant potential security issues in the IT world right now?
• How many of those issues affect my organization?
• Do I have a good understanding of where my organization is vulnerable?
• How can my team quickly respond to security issues as they arise?

These things boil down to this: Fear of the unknown comes from a lack of visibility from segregated systems and software. If you can't see your issues, you can’t do anything about them.

The Vulnerability Response module can give you a comprehensive view of all your vulnerabilities through the integration with the ServiceNow CMDB. You will be able to see all assets and IT solutions across the entire organization, as well as the potential security threats they pose.

Now you can see your issues, and you’re ready to tackle the problem. 

4. Be proactive.  

The real key to effective security management is being proactive rather than reactive. With ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Response, you can see the full view of potential entry points and lock them down before a threat arises.

You’ll have access to key features that serve to secure your entire system proactively:

• Integrated performance analytics 
Identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement and consolidate scanning data to determine risk.
• Vulnerability solutions management  
View your organization’s most impactful remediation activities and monitor their completion.
• Software exposure assessment  
Accurately assess exposure to software vulnerabilities and manage remediation workflows proactively.
• Continuous monitoring. Dynamically update risk scores and prioritization, and adapt security policies based on monitoring data. 

RELATED: WHITE PAPER Using Vulnerability Response to Protect from Cyberattacks

With the proactive features provided, you and your team can sleep well knowing that an intelligent solution monitors and alerts you when security flaws arise.  

Gain back your peace of mind. 

While it is challenging to ensure that every user in every area of your organization is taking the proper precautions for IT security, having a proactive solution is a critical priority. With ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Response, you can have peace of mind knowing you are one step ahead of security threats.

If you’d like to talk about how to quickly gain back peace of mind around your organization's security, we’d love to start a conversation.