How Vulnerability Assessment Can Save Your Business

As your business grows and acquires a global footprint, your online assets require protection against external and internal threats. And, you will know your weaknesses only through a vulnerability assessment.

When you subject your company’s systems and processes to intense scrutiny, you glean extensive knowledge about assets and generate data on the risks your operations carry.

Read on to understand how vulnerability assessment can save your business from cybercrime.

How Vulnerability Assessment Saves Your Business From Data Breach, litigation, And Penalties

Vulnerability management is the touchstone promoting data security in a highly explosive ecosystem rife with cybercrime.

1. Vulnerability Assessment Proactively Identifies Weaknesses To Thwart Cyberattacks

Internal vulnerability scanning logs into the system and digs deeper within the network to uncover the safety flaws that compromise your security.

External vulnerability scanning gives your business the outsider’s perspective of the network vulnerabilities that would escape your notice.

2. Vulnerability Assessment Builds Trust In Your Customers, Prospects, And Shareholders

End-users of products and services need reassurance that their transactions are secure and their digital identities and assets are safe.

The importance of vulnerability assessment lies in giving businesses an understanding of where actual business risks lie and how you can neutralize them.

The trust the consumers impose in you becomes a reflection of your increased strategic competitive advantage.

3. Vulnerability Assessment Evaluates Third-Party IT Service Providers

A business thrives on forging partnerships, but these alliances can create security and compliance issues. Vulnerability assessment comprehensively vets partners, subsidiary firms, affiliates, and remote units, cross-checking vulnerability issues so you can decide to retain or discard the alliance.

 4. Vulnerability Assessment Is An Essential Tool For Regulatory Compliance

In a world that is creating and sustaining regulatory frameworks, businesses that do not comply face enormous penalties, fines, and even disqualification. Companies are handling billions of transactions online that are impossible to monitor manually.

The AI and machine learning algorithms, empowering vulnerability assessment models, guarantee the best network security practices for achieving vital security benchmarks such as the ISO / IEC 27001:2013 certification.

5. Vulnerability Assessment Saves Time And De-Escalates The Costs Imposed By Losses And Liabilities

 

A single data breach imposes enormous costs on organizations besides the loss of reputation and legal hurdles. Vulnerability assessment saves the workforce and person-hours required to maintain archaic security protocols and nips expensive litigation in the bud by plugging loopholes before bad actors can exploit them.

The Anatomy Of A Vulnerability Assessment Report

In a manually controlled security system, it’s easy to underestimate the vulnerabilities within your environment, impossible to determine the nature and scope of actual risk quickly, and difficult to prioritize remedial action, and you are bound to waste too much time in the process.

The vulnerability assessment report gets to the heart of security issues within no time by investigating vulnerabilities using high-tech tools.

Vulnerability name: Each security risk gets a name and allocation to different mission-critical categories according to their impact on the business.

Discovery date: The vulnerability points will be graphically elaborate, enumerating the dates when the systems and servers go through the scanning.

Description of the vulnerability: This provides the macro view for executives, detailing how critical the uncovered problems are, the kinds of activities to kickstart, how many vulnerabilities the organization faces, and the overall risk the business has to remedy.

Correcting the vulnerability: Once you know where a particular issue originates and why it is a risk, you get a high-level recommendation on mitigating the problem. The guidelines explain what needs fixing and how.

The Proof of concept (POC): The vendor working for the company simulates an actual attack on the company systems and servers. The company gets real-time feedback on patching security holes without exposing systems or data. The Proof of concept code handed to the business becomes the model repeatable in the future to ensure the new security architecture works.

Remember that the Vulnerability Assessment Report is a snapshot or moment in time reflecting your security posture. To get the bigger picture of your entire IT infrastructure, you need regular vulnerability assessments done weekly or monthly.

Conclusion

Businesses have the option of reacting to vulnerabilities as they are discovered and patching operating systems flaws, and reconfiguring security settings over the entire network.

The logical and saner alternative is to proactively seek and rectify vulnerabilities before hackers surface to exploit them.

Organizations serious about securing and saving their businesses from internal and external threats require foolproof vulnerability management tools to project the highest level of security posture.