Risk-based vulnerability management: Your answer to vulnerability overload

Key takeaways

• Legacy vulnerability management is reactive and only assesses traditional, on-prem assets, which creates visibility gaps and leaves your organization exposed.
• Risk-based vulnerability management is proactive and gives your teams continuous visibility across your entire attack surface, including AI, cloud, and OT assets.
• A risk-focused approach uses machine learning, threat intelligence, and asset criticality data to pinpoint the few vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to your business.

Why legacy vulnerability management falls short

Legacy vulnerability management tools fall short in today’s complex IT landscape, which includes AI, cloud resources, containers, web apps, identity platforms and OT assets.

These traditional tools fail to give you a unified, real-time view of your environment. More frustratingly, they flood you with vulnerability data, forcing you to dig into technical details, instead of telling you which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk to your organization.

In contrast, risk-based vulnerability management gives you foundational visibility into your entire business environment and shows you exactly which vulnerabilities to fix first.

A risk-based approach uses machine learning to go beyond the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and show you the actual threat potential of every vulnerability. It allows you to prioritize remediation based on whether threat actors are actively exploiting a vulnerability in the wild and how critical the asset is to your business.

• Get the comparison guide to learn more about risk-based vulnerability management.

Moving beyond alerts to actionable remediation

Traditional vulnerability management tools keep your teams in a constant, reactive "firefighting" mode. It’s error-prone and often ignores other high-risk vulnerabilities. Other common challenges for traditional vulnerability management:

Assesses only traditional IT infrastructure

Developers created legacy vulnerability management tools for a different era. They only assess traditional, on-prem assets like desktops, laptops, servers, and network devices. This limited visibility puts your business at risk by ignoring large parts of the modern attack surface, like AI, the cloud, containers, OT, etc.

Classifies vulnerabilities by severity data

These tools classify too many vulnerabilities as high and critical and don’t give you actionable guidance to help you effectively triage. They categorize vulnerabilities by severity alone (like CVSS), but these technical metrics do not map to business outcomes. It causes confusion and can create a false sense of security.

Checks minimum compliance boxes

A legacy approach to vulnerability management only meets the minimum requirements to pass an audit. It focuses exclusively on in-scope assets and often ignores other business-critical assets.

Provides static, point-in-time snapshots

Legacy vulnerability scanning often happens monthly or less frequently, which means your analytics use old data and lead to late and incomplete corrective action.

How risk-based vulnerability management decreases your cyber risk

Risk-based vulnerability management moves your cybersecurity program from reactive to proactive. It helps you focus your resources and gives you optimized, automated processes for identifying and addressing the few truly high-risk vulnerabilities for your specific organization.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sees your entire attack surface

Risk-based vulnerability management discovers and assesses all your assets, including traditional IT, cloud resources, containers, web apps and OT assets.

2. Adds business context

It maps all traditional and modern assets to your business systems to measure overall business system risk as part of a unified platform like the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform.

3. Prioritizes with intelligence

It uses machine learning, threat intelligence (like the near-term likelihood of exploitability), and asset criticality to prioritize the vulnerabilities that pose actual business risk to your organization.

4. Enables proactive remediation

It provides clear, daily analytics so your team can move from reactive firefighting to proactively fixing the few truly high-risk vulnerabilities.

• Download the guide to see a side-by-side analysis of legacy vulnerability management vs. risk-based vulnerability management.

Proactive or reactive vulnerability management?

Risk-based vulnerability management removes the guesswork from vulnerability prioritization. Instead of wondering which vulnerabilities to tackle first, risk-based vulnerability management gives you clear answers.

If you are tired of wading through the never-ending vulnerability backlog, it’s time to shift to a risk-based vulnerability management approach.

• Get the two-pager to learn how risk-based vulnerability management helps you focus on the few vulnerabilities that matter most.

Frequently asked questions about risk-based vulnerability management

Find answers to common questions about risk-based vulnerability management. This information can help you understand the key details.

What is the difference between legacy vulnerability management and risk-based vulnerability management?

Legacy vulnerability management is reactive and focuses on traditional, on-prem assets. Risk-based vulnerability management is proactive and provides continuous, dynamic visibility across your entire attack surface, including cloud and OT.

Why are CVSS scores alone insufficient for prioritization?

CVSS scores are a technical metric that categorizes vulnerabilities by severity alone. Static vulnerability scoring classifies too many vulnerabilities as "high" or "critical" and fails to map the vulnerability to your actual business risk or asset criticality.

What are the benefits of a risk-based approach?

A risk-based approach to vulnerability management gives you comprehensive visibility of your entire attack surface, pinpoints the few vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk, and delivers dynamic, continuous visibility with daily analytics.

How does risk-based vulnerability management handle the modern attack surface?

Unlike legacy tools built to assess on-premises assets, a risk-based approach discovers and assesses cloud resources, containers, web apps, identity platforms, and OT assets. It maps these assets to business systems to measure your overall business risk.

• Get the two-page comparison guide to risk-based and traditional vulnerability management now.