Organizations face an ever-evolving threat landscape. With this in mind, it is imperative that organizations keep an up-to-date vulnerability management policy for remediating and controlling security vulnerabilities that may lead to a breach. A good vulnerability management policy should contain the following:

  1. An Overview of what the policy is intended to do.
  2. The Scope of the policy.
  3. Roles and Responsibilities under the organization.
  4. Vulnerability Remediation/Risk Mitigation.

Overview

Taking the time to give a short summary of the policy as well as who and what it involves will help to better flesh out the policy that the organization is trying to implement. Describing what types of devices, software, and networks that are subject to vulnerability scanning will decrease the likelihood of future vulnerabilities and keep an organization’s information security infrastructure up to date.

Aside from keeping an organization’s information security infrastructure up to date, implementing a strong vulnerability management policy is essential to help reduce its potential financial, reputational and regulatory risks that could befall an organization with a weaker policy.

Scope of the Policy

There is no such thing as one size fits all when it comes to security. Different areas of the IT infrastructure will require different considerations and therefore should be broken into policy scopes. Some scopes you might consider include network infrastructure, company owned devices, servers, OSes, virtual machines, cloud-hosted servers, DB servers, applications, and networking gear. A clearly defined vulnerability management program will help to reduce confusion of what is expected and required to secure assets within the organization.

Roles and Responsibilities

Having clearly defined roles for personnel under which the vulnerability management policy is enacted well help employees understand who they should look to if an issue that’s encountered falls under the vulnerability management policy. Some commonly defined roles are Chief Information Security Officer (Read more...)