Want to eliminate the security gaps in your IT infrastructure? Your first stop should be vulnerability assessments (VAs). Vulnerability assessments can help you catalogue your assets and resources, assign them criticality ratings and identify potential threats to them. With that information in hand, you can develop a strategy to deal with your most serious vulnerabilities first and reduce your exposure to hackers. To make the most of a VA, follow these three phases:

Related post: Benefits of a Vulnerability Assessment

Get ready…

Before you conduct your assessments, establish the boundaries of your two main objectives: planning and performance. In the planning stage, you’ll want to gather relevant information, define the scope of activities, and define the roles and responsibilities for informing internal teams about changes to the management processes. In the performing stage, interview system administrators and review the policies and procedures related to the systems you’ll be scanning.

Eliminating Security Gaps with Vulnerability Assessments https://t.co/ytRPznnUOP pic.twitter.com/RPFnhnNTnQ

— Hitachi Sys Security (@HitachiSysSec) 15 août 2017

Get set…

Once you’ve identified potential security issues, review the results with stakeholders, and tie them to the management processes. This is an important step to ensuring issues are established and vulnerabilities resolved. This is also the time for storing and reviewing data for companywide risk analysis and trending.

Go!

A VA is only as useful as the plan if the information is leveraged and acted upon. Figure out which vulnerabilities need fixing and address the ones that represent the highest risk to the company by priority.

A VA provides an accurate point-in-time representation of your security posture, but one point in time is not enough to secure your IT assets and resources. Conduct VAs on a continual basis for best results.