Seven ways to make sure you're bringing your vulnerability management A-game

Are you an MSP or MSSP who is concerned about equipping your clients with the best vulnerability management services possible? We've put together a quick assessment checklist to help you evaluate whether your vulnerability management services are up to par.

Let's get started…

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1. Run client satisfaction surveys

You want your clientele to keep returning to your business, and customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to make that happen.

A satisfaction survey is a questionnaire or survey that is sent to clients in order to measure their satisfaction with a company's products or services. They can be used to identify areas of improvement, as well as to track progress over time. They can also help companies better understand what clients like and don't like about their products and services.

As vulnerability management is typically a reactive service – whereby you respond to scan data, prioritising and patching accordingly - it can be hard to measure effectiveness or improvements in performance over time. This is where client satisfaction surveys can help. By breaking it down into measures such as speed to react, communication, and decision making, you can ask clients to score out of five and then ask for clarification if needed.

You can administer these surveys in a variety of ways, including through email, postal mail, or online. If you can spare the time, however, try to conduct them face-to-face as it will allow you to drill down further into problem areas if needed, as well as facilitate deeper client relationships in the long term.

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2. Keep an eye on your competition

Competitor monitoring involves keeping close tabs on your biggest threats and is a great way to stay ahead of the curve. Intel gathered can help you avoid making the same mistakes as your competition by identifying where they went wrong. Perhaps they made a bold claim to the market about their vulnerability management approach or performance that missed the mark?

More significantly, analysing your competition's past behaviour enables you to forecast their future moves and strategies. For example, look out for a recruitment drive by any of your competitors for key vulnerability management roles. This could tell you that they are planning expansion.

Follow competitors closely to take steps in evolving your vulnerability management services and tools in order to stand out in the marketplace.

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3. Maintain a robust staff performance management programme

Although measuring and assessing performance management in vulnerability management can be challenging, it is crucial for improving team effectiveness, minimising disruptions, and retaining top employees.

Having a consistent team in place is key for effective vulnerability management. Retain your best talent and ensure you have a professional team in place for years to come by taking care of employee progression and succession planning.

Employee progression describes how an employee should rise through the ranks of a company, gain more knowledge and abilities, and take on more responsibilities.

In succession planning, you identify specific individuals who you believe could step into a more major role (should the present person retire, leave, or be promoted) and then provide the "next-in-line" with the training and expertise they need in advance.

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4. Ask satisfied clients for testimonials and referrals

These days, your company's most persuasive sales presentation comes from your most loyal customers.

That's right: Your best sales rep, believe it or not, does not work for your organisation. Instead, they're the very same individuals you serve.

Today, people have less faith in traditional corporate communication, such as marketing, advertising, and sales, than ever before. They want to hear from real people—not the company itself—about their experiences with products and services. That's why you need word-of-mouth recommendations, positive testimonials, and personal referrals from your clients to stay ahead.

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5. Strengthen your workforce with Recognition Awards

You might think it's strange that the makers of a prioritisation tool are discussing personal development, but we feel these are inextricably intertwined.

The concern is that vulnerability management professionals — now often overloaded with work due to a prevailing skills gap — do not have adequate time to complete their duties. This in turn is creating a decline in morale and wellness, as well as burnout.

So what can you do? For one thing, you should continually gather evidence of your team's effectiveness and success and reward their efforts via public recognition awards.

This is one of the most vital initiatives you can promote to boost and future-proof the value of your team to the company. It will also mean a lot to them!

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6. Utilise all the vulnerability management tools and technology available to support your teams

If you want to build a scalable IT services business, you must have the right tools and processes to support all of your clients and provide them with a superior service. This means integrating the best vulnerability management software that your business requires and can afford.

There are a wealth of different tools available to support every element of your vulnerability management programs and some will even do all the work for you. However, many of these types of software use secret algorithms to prioritise vulnerabilities before they’re remediated. This can have negative implications for you as a service provider because it means you lose control over how decisions are being made and could mean your clients are put at greater risk of attack.

Instead, we recommend using tools that optimise your performance and give you greater control at the same time. RankedRight is an automated vulnerability prioritisation platform that saves businesses hours of admin time with every new scan. By following rules set by the user, and enriching MSPs’ clients' scan data with the most up-to-date vulnerability intelligence, RankedRight prioritises vulnerabilities in order of criticality and delegates them to the most appropriate team to resolve. This means a more profitable way of working for managed service providers and a more efficient and effective vulnerability management program for your clients.

7. Use a risk-based vulnerability management approach

Risk-based vulnerability management is where vulnerabilities are managed in order of risk they pose to the business, greatest to lowest. This method requires an effective vulnerability prioritisation process or tool so that they are sorted accordingly ready for the remediation teams to tackle.

A corporation looking for vulnerability management support may be presented with a slew of low-cost options for addressing vulnerabilities in bulk but it’s likely the provider will deliver this promise by prioritising the vulnerabilities that are the quickest and easiest to fix. As these vulnerabilities may pose a far lesser risk to the business than others, this activity is not improving the company’s security posture and a breach could be moments away.

Recovering from breaches tends to be prohibitively expensive, not to mention damaging to one's reputation. So if you want to deliver an effective vulnerability management service clients, use a risk-based, not a volume-based, approach.

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Become a RankedRight Security Partner

At RankedRight, we want to help you remove the stress from vulnerability management. In fact, it's our mission.

We aim to provide our partners with the most up-to-date intelligence and technology so they can make the best decisions for keeping their clients safe and secure.

Ready to remove the stress from vulnerability management?