Beyond Patching: Why a Risk-Based Approach to Vulnerability Management Is Essential
The cybersecurity industry has long treated patching as the gold standard for vulnerability management. It is the cornerstone of compliance frameworks, a key metric for security performance, and often the first response to a newly discovered vulnerability. But patching alone is no longer enough.
In the 2025 Gartner® report, We’re Not Patching Our Way Out of Vulnerability Exposure it is stated that:
“The cold, hard reality is that no one is outpatching threat actors at scale in any size organization, geography or industry vertical.”
Organizations are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of vulnerabilities disclosed each year, many of which remain unpatched indefinitely. In fact, Gartner found that:
“12% of vulnerabilities disclosed every year remain unpatched. This is a good measurement for organizations to use to quantify how many vulnerabilities they have that aren’t getting patches.”
In our opinion, this is not simply a matter of security teams moving too slowly. The complexity of modern IT environments, business-critical applications, and operational requirements create unavoidable barriers to fast and effective patching. As Gartner states:
“A measurement to track here is how many hours of downtime, nonproductivity and customer-facing outages are occurring from patching and other operational functions. One hundred hours lost from an ill-behaving patch can have the same business impact as 100 hours lost from a cybersecurity incident. Few organizations track this type of measurement today, but all should, as it is a viable way to help determine how risky the action of patching can be.”
Given these realities, we believe, organizations cannot rely on patching alone to manage vulnerability risk. They must evolve their approach.
How to Solve Vulnerability Management Today
Traditional vulnerability management focuses on patching and meeting compliance-driven timelines. However, as Gartner states:
“Transitioning from traditional vulnerability management approaches to risk-based prioritization and a more contextual handling of threat and exposure is the next step for organizations.”
A modern vulnerability management strategy must:
- Move beyond patching: Acknowledge that not all vulnerabilities can or will be patched and implement compensating controls where necessary.
- Prioritize effectively: Security teams must evaluate vulnerabilities based on their exploitability, business impact, and exposure, not just severity scores.
- Account for operational risks: Patch deployment must be assessed for its potential to disrupt critical business functions.
- Expand visibility: Understanding the full attack surface, including cloud, endpoints, applications, and third-party dependencies, is essential for reducing exposure.
The shift toward risk-based vulnerability management requires a unified, contextual approach, one that considers security and business needs in tandem.
Veriti’s Approach: Proactive, Risk-Based Exposure Management
At Veriti, we believe true vulnerability management goes beyond patching to proactively reduce risk in a way that aligns with business operations. Our approach strengthens security while ensuring that remediation efforts are safe and do not introduce unnecessary disruption.
- Critical Vulnerability Response
Organizations must act fast when high-profile vulnerabilities emerge. Veriti’s continuous assessment and safe remediation capabilities enable security teams to quickly understand and mitigate risk without rushing into destabilizing patch deployments.
- Vulnerability Enrichment for Smarter Prioritization
We believe vulnerabilities don’t exist in isolation. Veriti enhances raw vulnerability data with business context, exploitability intelligence, and compensating control visibility to help organizations prioritize effectively. Instead of blindly patching high CVSS-scored vulnerabilities, teams can focus on the ones that truly pose a risk to their environment.
- Attack Surface and Exposure Management
Patching is only part of the solution. Veriti expands vulnerability management beyond patching by helping security teams assess exposure across networks, endpoints, cloud environments, and applications. This ensures organizations aren’t just reacting to vulnerabilities but proactively reducing their overall attack surface.
- Remediation Impact Analysis
Every remediation action has the potential to disrupt business operations. That’s why Veriti helps teams assess the potential impact of remediation actions before deploying them. This ensures that security improvements do not cause downtime or operational friction.
True Proactive Security Requires:
- Continuous exposure management to identify and assess risks before attackers exploit them.
- Business-contextual vulnerability prioritization to ensure remediation efforts align with organizational risk tolerance.
- Safe, exposure remediation workflows that enhance security without introducing operational disruption.
Veriti’s unified approach bridges the gap between security and business operations, enabling organizations to proactively reduce risk while maintaining stability.
We believe the Gartner findings reinforce what security leaders already know: patching alone is not enough. Organizations must evolve beyond a patch-centric mindset and adopt a risk-based approach that accounts for business criticality, exposure, and exploitability.
Veriti empowers security and I&O teams to move beyond reactive patching toward a comprehensive exposure management strategy, one that protects organizations without disrupting business operations.
Gartner subscribers can access the full We’re Not Patching Our Way Out of Vulnerability Exposure report on the Gartner website.
Gartner, We’re Not Patching Our Way Out of Vulnerability Exposure, Chris Saunderson, Craig Lawson, Mitchell Schneider, 24 February 2025.
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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from VERITI authored by Veriti. Read the original post at: https://veriti.ai/blog/risk-based-approach/
