What Is Vulnerability Management and How It Supports Businesses

In these modern days, businesses and companies keep on adapting to new technologies and software meant to speed up and smooth many processes required to make things work.

Some of these processes include information storage needed to provide services, software that is capable of providing certain amenities, as well as internal-related functions like the management of products, orders, payments, and external services required to run the company.

The number of uses for technology and software is indeed too many to mention them all since they pretty much deal with a lot of aspects related to businesses.

That is why companies should work on having what is known as a vulnerability management program. This article is meant to be a guide to teach you what is vulnerability management and the reason behind its importance.

Something You Have to Understand

When it comes to software, there’s something important you have to understand, and that is the fact that none of the programs running in most companies and services are perfect. They require constant monitoring to make sure that everything is running as intended.

This is because a very important characteristic of any program and software known as the code is constantly changing. A code is pretty much a complex system of commands written on a specific coding language, which is the one teaching (or instructing) a computer to do very specific things.

A code is constantly running and changing for the sake of improving, renovating, and actualizing itself, and these changes are done with the help of programmers.

Now, although a programmer can indeed release a finished product, errors (mostly known as bugs) are still possible, and these bugs can greatly affect the features of said product.

Now, imagine what would happen to a company when software that is in charge of data storage suddenly starts malfunctioning?

A very good example of this situation is the incident that happened with Facebook in which information of more than 500 million accounts was pretty much leaked and stolen!

For those situations, companies rely on what is known as vulnerability management and create programs based on the said feature. But what is vulnerability management, and how does it work?

The Benefits of Vulnerability Management

So, as I mentioned earlier, all software out there has a flaw, which can also be described as a vulnerability. These flaws are capable of affecting some of the functions of said software.

Good examples of this include things like server shutdowns that completely stop customers from using the program, a sudden loss of valuable information linked to the software, and leaks of information that could be potentially misused.

Among the worst vulnerabilities out there, it is believed the worst ones enter the last category mentioned: the ones that allow outsiders to manipulate the information and functions of a company’s software.

This can pretty much be translated as money or product loss, as well as a loss of the trust of the customers that once believed in the capabilities of a company that has suffered a security breach.

That is why vulnerability management exists. This process focuses on finding bugs that could potentially harm a company, its customers, services, products, and managing processes. Then it categorizes these flaws into priorities and provides both methods of solving these problems as well as methods that could be used for cushioning the harm caused by them until more urgent problems are being dealt with.

Prioritizing is very important since it determines which flaws are more urgent and cause more damages in case multiple problems were to occur.

This allows staff members to distribute the work more accordingly based on the priority categories, and while they are dealing with more harmful situations, they can put lit to less important situations so less damage is caused.

A good example of this can be perceived in online multiplayer games. Nowadays, gaming is a very huge industry and it creates a lot of profits throughout the year, but games commonly suffer from bugs as well.

When a bug happens in a game, what companies often do is shut down aspects of the game that are suffering from bugs so players don’t benefit from such exploits in a way that could harm the company, its product, and other players.

A similar process is done by companies providing services as well. Many times, social media companies like Facebook have entirely shut down servers to avoid people from taking advantage of a problem that arises. This is one of the many cushioning techniques a company can use while a problem is being fixed.

That is why the monitoring aspect is as important since monitoring allows a company to be aware of a flaw occurring in the system then act as fast as possible to come up with a solution. That is why, companies either have a department or specialist in charge of monitoring and fixing flaws, or hire outside service providers to deal with these situations.