Six benefits of automating your vulnerability prioritisation

Automation can be a valuable tool for any business. By cutting out time-consuming administrative tasks, you can gain time back to focus on the more business critical activities.

So many parts of a vulnerability management programme can be, and are, automated but not always without some sort of sacrifice – whether it be transparency, profit margin, or even quality of service. There is  one part that, when done with the right platform, can avoid any such sacrifice – vulnerability prioritisation. This article will give you six reasons why automation is a must.

But first….let’s look at the alternative.

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Manual triage

Manual triage is the act of manually sorting through all of your vulnerability scan data to identify the vulnerabilities with the most severe associated risk and prioritising them accordingly. It is an extremely time intensive and resource-draining task. So much so in fact that our own research found that it can take an average of seven hours per week per 250 assets. Given that many enterprises have as many as tens of thousands of assets, that’s a huge drain on time. This brings us on to the first benefit of automation…

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Benefits of automating your vulnerability prioritisation:

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1. Save time

In vulnerability management, every second counts. The more time you have to spend on manual triage, the less time you have for remediation.

By automating the triage process, your remediation team doesn’t have to wait for a prioritised list of vulnerabilities to tackle. In the case of RankedRight, it’s ready within minutes of the scan data being ingested.

Not only that but it also delegates the prioritised vulnerabilities to the most appropriate people within your team to resolve, again saving on admin time.

2. Improve employee satisfaction

Vulnerability prioritisation, while crucial, can feel extremely laborious when done manually. By automating the process, you can allow your highly skilled and much in-demand team to spend their time on other important, but less dull, tasks or on development opportunities such as training or new business.

The industry is facing a skills shortage – keep your team happy and committed!

3. Improve your remediation impact

Another benefit of automating your vulnerability prioritisation is that the remediation team is no longer wasting time on low-risk vulnerabilities while the triage is carried out. They can start work on the most critical issues immediately, meaning that the time your business has allocated to that client is all spent on driving results.

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4. It is possible to maintain control

One myth around automation of vulnerability prioritisation is that by handing the process over to a platform, you lose all control over the decision-making process as the secret algorithms that control the platform take over. This means you can no longer give your clients transparency of service or a full report on impact.

It is true that a lot of platforms use secret algorithms, but not all. With RankedRight, you set the rules of prioritisation for the platform to follow and thereby remain in full control of the entire process.

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5. Gain a new service offering

The role of a MSSP is changing. As customers expect more and more from their service providers, it becomes increasingly important for a service provider to go beyond the traditional offering of monitoring security alerts and begin providing value added services within vulnerability management.

RankedRight gives you one such value added service by allowing you to offer vulnerability prioritisation as a white-labelled service to your clients. You can use it in a phased approach by offering the service to small numbers of clients first, thus gaining valuable experience and a better understanding of their needs before rolling it out more widely.

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6. Provide a more consistent service

The final benefit of automating your vulnerability prioritisation? One of the downsides of human labour is that people can be inconsistent or make mistakes. And because manual triage is not a robust or repeatable process, if the person who does that work leaves, the next person will reinvent the wheel.  

Not only that but the volume of data from scans can fluctuate significantly. If sorted manually, this will affect time taken to prioritise and therefore speed at which critical vulnerabilities can be tackled.

By automating the process, you can ensure that no matter what happens to your team, or how much scan data is to be sorted, the prioritisation will be done quickly and correctly.

Automating the prioritisation process for your clients’ vulnerability management programs is a no-brainer. It will save your team time, improve your remediation impact, increase employee satisfaction and provide you with a new service offering. If you sign up to RankedRight, there’s one more – you’ll maintain full control and oversight of the process which is key for client satisfaction.

Interested to see how it could transform your operations?