You’re exploring options for improving your cybersecurity strategy, and you’ve stumbled upon Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaaS) as a potential solution. It promises to help improve your security posture by uniquely combining Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) and Intelligent Remediation capabilities with expert guidance.
You’re left wondering, what’s the catch? Well, we don’t believe there is one. VMaaS offers many benefits for both growing and enterprise businesses focused on streamlining risk management.
In our last article, we dove deep into explaining What is VMaaS? Understanding Vulnerability Management as a Service. We recommend you read that article before this one. Once you’re all caught up, come back here and we’ll walk through why VMaaS is so beneficial and important for modern businesses.
Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaaS) vs. traditional vulnerability management: What’s the difference?
Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaaS) has the potential to transform how organizations secure open source software and manage vulnerabilities.
With traditional vulnerability management, scans and remediation are time-consuming, manual, full of delays, and error prone. It also tends to be more reactive, tackling threats as they arise rather than getting in front of potential vulnerabilities. Large enterprises that are managing huge volumes of code will discover very quickly that the traditional way of monitoring for vulnerabilities just doesn’t cut it.
On the other hand, VMaaS provides proactive, continuous, and automated security monitoring, and intelligent remediation, giving DevSecOps teams more breathing room in their day. VMaaS streamlines the detection, prioritization, and remediation process by integrating directly into development workflows.
ActiveState’s VMaaS solution delivers the last mile of vulnerability management through risk prioritization, precision remediation, and expert guidance. This allows DevSecOps teams to efficiently detect vulnerabilities in open source packages, implement fixes seamlessly, and ensure applications remain secure.
Teams can rest assured knowing VMaaS is operating 24/7, continuously monitoring and taking action without requiring constant oversight from the team. This helps your DevOps team get ahead of fixing vulnerabilities before bad actors identify and exploit them. After all, exploits are available for >50% within seven days.
Why VMaaS is an essential part of any good risk management and cybersecurity strategy
Modern development and security teams are faced with more threats than ever. On top of that, excessive data, false positives, and a lack of prioritization make it difficult to take steps forward.
When developing your cybersecurity strategy, it’s essential to consider the role technology, AI and security automation can play in easing this burden. VMaaS leverages all three, as well as expert guidance, to empower your team and holistically improve risk management.
Here’s why you should consider security as a service for your team.
1. Continuously monitor, detect, and mitigate threats
Unlike traditional vulnerability management methods that rely on scheduled, periodic checks, VMaaS continuously scans your codebase in real time, catching vulnerabilities the moment they appear. As talented as your DevSecOps team members are, humans can’t replicate this lightning-fast response time.
VMaaS can kick in with automated security remediation immediately, prioritizing and applying fixes without your team having to step in. Staying ahead of threats and patching issues before they become a problem gives your team the space they need to focus on what they do best – innovation.
2. Automate and scale your security efforts
Is your team spending an increasing amount of time managing and mitigating vulnerabilities and falling behind on other strategic work? Security as a service can greatly reduce that manual workload with the help of automation and AI.
VMaaS works together with Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) to provide a set of solutions that help automate application security – from detecting and scanning vulnerabilities–, to prioritizing and patching them.
Automation is a magic ingredient for growing teams that need to scale their security efforts without necessarily scaling their head count. Also, VMaaS is a flexible solution that supports cloud, hybrid, and on-premise work environments, depending on your needs.
3. Accurately perform risk-based vulnerability prioritization
Not all vulnerabilities pose the same risk. VMaaS helps you make sure you’re focusing on the most impactful vulnerabilities first. It evaluates and ranks vulnerabilities based on real-world exploitability using AI and advanced analytics, so you’re not wasting precious time on low-risk issues while critical threats go unaddressed.
4. Seamlessly integrate with DevSecOps
Let’s face it, change management is hard. Another perk of implementing VMaaS is that it fits within your existing SDLC process, proactively managing vulnerabilities throughout. This enables your developers to fix security issues early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
For example, your development team can leverage an approved set of open source packages from a trustworthy, curated, and secure catalogue. This minimizes the chance of vulnerabilities even making it into your code in the first place.Shifting security fixes left in the SDLC helps take the pressure off your security teams to catch vulnerabilities just in the nick of time. The goal of VMaaS is to introduce a proactive, methodical approach to improving security.
5. Improve compliance and regulatory readiness
The larger your codebase and more complex your applications, the harder it is to stay on top of regulatory and open source compliance. VMaaS helps automate security reporting and audit trails for compliance with standards like NIST, ISO, and GDPR. You’ll always feel ready for any regulatory inquiries or audits.
6. Benefit from a cost effective security strategy
Scaling your security efforts can add up fast. By relying on automation and expert experience, VMaaS helps eliminate the need for hiring additional full-time security professionals on your team. VMaaS can also help you avoid on-premise infrastructure that is complicated and expensive to set up.
Those are just two ways VMaaS saves you money up front. Down the line, an improved security posture can offer massive savings by decreasing the risk of costly data breaches and downtime.
Conclusion
Traditional vulnerability management just doesn’t cut it anymore. The sheer volume of threats, combined with the complexity of modern development environments, makes the status quo of manual security practices outdated and inefficient. Businesses can no longer afford to fall farther behind.
VMaaS offers a scalable solution with the help of automation, AI and expert guidance, to continuously monitor, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities with minimal disruption to your team’s existing SDLC.
By integrating seamlessly with DevSecOps workflows, VMaaS helps security teams ‘shift security left’, stay compliant and audit-ready, and focus on proactive risk management rather than chasing down vulnerabilities.
If you’re ready to break free from the endless cycle of manual vulnerability management and take a more efficient, scalable approach to security, VMaaS could be the solution your business needs.
Book a demo to explore ActiveState’s open source security platform today.
