It can be difficult to identify gaps in your managed device estate, let alone prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation once they’ve surfaced. Remediating threat exposures often requires coordination across different teams and can be a time-consuming, arduous process.

On the second Tuesday of every month, most IT staffers join in on an industry-wide fire drill to “patch all the bad things” in their environments as quickly as humanly possible. It’s not without good reason, either, as it’s well established that failure to do so carries high risk.

In addition to potential exposure to threat actors, poor security hygiene and unmitigated configuration issues have resulted in numerous data breach fines, ransom payments, and reputational impacts:

Fines and recovery costs

Based on a study conducted by IBM and Ponemon Institute in 2022, it is estimated that data breaches will cost the average company $4.35 million in 2022.

Ransomware

What should have been a single device security incident can become a ransom payment when vulnerabilities are exploited in environments with overall poor security hygiene.

Reputational impact

Security breaches can negatively affect many aspects of a company, including investment, buyer behavior, and hiring populations.

You could be lucky if adequate preventative controls limit further threat or detective controls facilitate an isolated incident response. Or you could be unlucky, forced to shut down temporarily causing a loss of revenue, compelled to pay a ransom to criminal organizations, or, in less frequent cases, go out of business altogether.

Teams and their tools must work together to reduce and eliminate risk effectively. Waiting until Patch Tuesday to cover your bases isn’t the strongest strategy in today’s threat environment.

Challenging times for IT teams

Let’s back up and start with how we got to where we are today.

For starters, Gartner’s 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap for Large Enterprises report stated that “64 percent of IT executives cite talent shortages as the most significant barrier to the adoption of emerging technology, compared with only 4 percent in 2020.”

Staffing shortages are a big deal right now, however they’re not the only issue confronting an industry that’s experienced “the great resignation.” Our remote-first reality also makes managing organizational risks more complex, especially where legacy technology choices have proliferated. The dependence on VPNs for client management tools or special perimeter firewall configurations in order to make on-premise server resources accessible externally.

But there’s another factor at play. Interestingly, if you critically examine the vulnerability management process that exists in most organizations today, there’s often a different type of risk: opposing incentives among stakeholders.

You see, the security world indexes performance on risk reduction and SLAs, but the IT teams responsible for remediating vulnerabilities measure success by uptime and timely delivery of revenue generation projects.

So, how do you reconcile these opposing incentives? The answer, in a word, is ‘automation.’

Our solution – Automated Vulnerability Remediation (AVR)

AVR links the teams that find and fix vulnerabilities with the tools those teams use to remediate – like Rapid7 InsightVM and Automox. AVR gives you the power to discover unmanaged endpoints and shorten vulnerability remediation cycles. Plus, this cloud-to-cloud integration needs no installations or downloads. Simply configure, ingest vulnerability information, and remediate.

Here are three of the key functions AVR employs to make sure your teams can deploy actions at scale on configuration-based vulnerabilities and emergent problems when swift action is needed.

• Patchable solutions: Automating the handoff process for vulnerability remediation targets allows teams to start chipping away at problems sooner, at minimum. Driving down gaps in patching policies will ensure that your endpoints are up-to-date all of the time.

• Rapid7 solutions: Brings vendor solution details to our Worklet automation engine, allowing you to act on emerging and complex threats that are not as simple as applying a fix.

• Unknown hosts: Provide operators with a powerful new way to identify visibility gaps in the managed device estate between Rapid7’s InsightVM and Automox.

How does AVR work?

• Step 1: Configure a Rapid7 connection in the Automox console using a Rapid7 insight platform API key.

• Step 2: Choose a target vulnerability scope range: Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency identified threats, vulnerabilities that have three or more exploits published, vulnerabilities with critical exploits available, commonly exploited vulnerabilities, or (CVSSv3) vulnerabilities that are greater than a severity score of eight. You can also optionally add a Rapid7 InsightVM tag to further scope.

• Step 3: Save the configuration and go!

Reduce threat exposures with automation

By using AVR, it’s easier to reduce threat exposures, so you can work more effectively to reduce risk and minimize the potential for disasters.

In the world of security, there are no guarantees. But automation can drastically impact your susceptibility to data breaches and fines, major vulnerability exposures, and ransomware that may affect your reputation in the long run.

To learn more about minimizing threat exposure through automation, join us for a remote discussion hosted by SecureWorld on Wednesday, September 14, 2022 at 10 AM.

We’ll show you how to:

• Create seamless collaboration between your IT and SecOps teams

• Reduce threat exposure while minimizing time and effort spent on manual tasks

• Accelerate your process for deploying patches and configuration changes that address known vulnerabilities

Save your spot today and start automating the minimization of your threat exposures with Rapid7 and Automox!

• How can sysadmins get their work done faster and on a super-low budget?

• What is patch management, really?

• What are the top remote patch management best practices?

Automox for Easy IT Operations

Automox is the cloud-native IT operations platform for modern organizations. It makes it easy to keep every endpoint automatically configured, patched, and secured – anywhere in the world. With the push of a button, IT admins can fix critical vulnerabilities faster, slash cost and complexity, and win back hours in their day.