What are vulnerability management metrics?
Vulnerability management metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that help businesses track and measure how well they handle the vulnerability management process. By choosing and monitoring the right vulnerability management metrics, businesses can get a good sense of how their vulnerability management program is doing and whether there’s room for improvement.
To understand the ins and outs of vulnerability management metrics, we first have to touch on vulnerability management. Your environments are rife with risks like API vulnerabilities, unsecured data, and poor access controls. If any of these problems are exploited by adversaries, it could lead to data breaches, compliance violations, and other headaches.
To pinpoint and get rid of dangerous vulnerabilities (like the ones identified by MITRE), you need a strong vulnerability management program. But there’s a catch: No matter how good your vulnerability management program is, you need the right metrics to know what’s going on. Gartner says that 67% of surveyed leaders believe that the metrics and reporting of their vulnerability program aren’t good enough.
Neglecting vulnerability management metrics is asking for trouble. In this article, we’ll examine why they’re so important for businesses.
The Ultimate Vulnerability Management Playbook [AWS Edition]
Actionable steps to identify, assess, and mitigate AWS vulnerabilities, ensuring your cloud infrastructure is protected.
Download PDF
How does tracking the right vulnerability management metrics help security teams?
With vulnerability management, your security teams probably already have their hands full. From conducting vulnerability assessments to using a range of vulnerability scanning tools to keep environments safe, it’s a job full of challenges. The right vulnerability management metrics can help expedite and improve key activities performed by security teams across the entire vulnerability management lifecycle.
Let’s break down a few key advantages of using the right vulnerability management metrics.
Navigating compliance: By tracking the right metrics, businesses can set themselves up for compliance audits—when vulnerability management information may be needed at the drop of a hat.
Evaluating tools: With the right metrics, security teams can offer data-based evidence about the efficacy of vulnerability management tools and other security investments.
Assessing resource usage: In busy cloud environments with hundreds of security incidents, resource management can easily get out of hand. Tracking targeted vulnerability management metrics can help security teams make sure that resources are used economically and that security workflows are as tight as can be.
Reducing dangerous risks: Without the right vulnerability management metrics, it’s possible to believe that a vulnerability management program is working well while dangerous risks fester unnoticed. By staying on top of vulnerability management metrics and KPIs, your security teams can find and eradicate critical risks that actually matter to your organization.
Reinforcing the overall security posture: Using the right metrics, security teams get an accurate picture of how well they are pruning down the company’s attack surface, hardening applications, and remediating vulnerabilities. They’ll be able to identify and work on weaknesses and revamp the enterprise cloud environment into a digital fortress.
Improving security all year round: As touched on earlier, proactivity is key in cloud environments. The right vulnerability management metrics can ensure that security teams are performing fixes, updating tools and capabilities, and minimizing the attack surface ahead of time instead of only when incidents occur.
What’s the difference between operational and outcome-based vulnerability management metrics?
The issue with vulnerability management today is that identifying every vulnerability isn’t enough to protect an enterprise. Reason one: Almost no organization has the security resources and bandwidth to deal with every vulnerability. Reason two: Not all vulnerabilities matter.
If you want to accurately discover and fix the most dangerous vulnerabilities and then validate the quality of those fixes, you need the right vulnerability management metrics. They can be broken down into two broad categories:
Operational vulnerability management metrics: These vulnerability management metrics home in on the basics of vulnerability discovery. The number of vulnerabilities found is a simple example of an operational vulnerability management metric. Operational vulnerability management metrics are useful but, in isolation, may not be enough in cloud environments. That’s why solely using operational vulnerability management metrics is considered an outdated approach.
Outcome-based vulnerability management metrics: These vulnerability management metrics focus more on the short-, mid-, and long-term effects of having a vulnerability management program in place. An example? Risk reduction over time. Such metrics look beyond the fundamentals of vulnerability management and go into the high-level effects and improvements that a vulnerability management program can introduce.
Quick reference guide: Operational vs. outcome-based vulnerability management metrics
| Area | Operational vulnerability management metrics | Outcome-based vulnerability management metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | The fundamentals of vulnerability management | The short-, mid-, and long-term outcomes of a vulnerability management program |
| Objective | To evaluate how well businesses find and fix vulnerabilities | To measure the effects and business implications of finding and fixing vulnerabilities |
| Examples |
|
|
What kind of vulnerability management metrics do cloud environments need?
Anyone who has worked with on-premises IT environments before moving to the cloud will tell you that the cloud is a different beast altogether. It’s faster and more complex, with more moving parts than the eye can see. So what does vulnerability management in the cloud involve?
Some keywords that are important are proactivity, context, and prioritization. Because the cloud is so high-octane, it’s almost pointless to find and fix vulnerabilities late. By then, a whole cascade of new problems may have begun, leaving operations in disarray. You can see why operational vulnerability metrics, like the number of vulnerabilities found, may lack the proactivity, context, and prioritization needed in the cloud.
Just using outcome-based vulnerability management metrics without having a complete inventory of all vulnerabilities in your cloud estate is also insufficient. If you’re working in complex multi-cloud environments, you need an assortment of operational and outcome-based metrics that cover every step of the vulnerability management lifecycle.
In the cloud, your vulnerability management metrics should measure how well critical vulnerabilities are discovered and dealt with, instead of just counting how many low-risk vulnerabilities are found. In other words, cloud-based vulnerability management metrics should give you the “why,” not just the “what” and “how” of your vulnerability management program’s core activities.
Vulnerability management metrics: Key categories and examples
In this section, we’ll take a look at the most important vulnerability management metrics, one category at a time.
Vulnerability discovery performance metrics
A typical vulnerability management lifecycle has five steps:
Discover
Prioritize
Remediate
Validate
Report
Our first category of vulnerability management metrics focuses on discovery and detection. These metrics will tell you how good your vulnerability management program is at finding vulnerabilities.
Examples of vulnerability discovery performance metrics
Vulnerability scan coverage focuses on the extent of your vulnerability scanning capabilities. It reveals what percentage of your cloud assets and environments your vulnerability program reaches. This metric is useful during the early stages of a vulnerability development program because it identifies coverage gaps that your security teams need to patch ASAP.
Mean time to detect (MTTD) measures how quickly cloud security teams find a vulnerability. Whenever your MTTD starts to slide, it’s time to take a closer look at your detection tools, capabilities, configurations, and frequency.
Automated vulnerability detection rate centers on how many vulnerabilities are caught by automated systems rather than by manual efforts. The higher the automated vulnerability detection rate is, the more on point your overall vulnerability management program is.
True positive vulnerability detection rate tells you how many vulnerabilities your vulnerability scanning tool has found in your environments. Since it’s more of a measurement of coverage than criticality, this metric is ideal for comparing potential vulnerability scanning options.
False positive rates are one of the most important metrics to eradicate alert fatigue and free up your security teams. False positive rates are a measurement of how many nonexistent or nonthreatening vulnerabilities your vulnerability scanning tool flags.
Unidentified vulnerability detection rate reveals how many vulnerabilities were discovered via proactive vulnerability scanning (the responsible way) as opposed to how many were discovered only after an incident (the risky way).
Vulnerability prioritization performance metrics
A high percentage of vulnerabilities in cloud environments are just noise. Vulnerability prioritization performance metrics measure how well businesses sift out and tackle the most dangerous vulnerabilities.
Examples of vulnerability prioritization performance metrics:
Vulnerability risk score: Once your vulnerability scanners identify vulnerabilities in your environment, these metrics help you see how dangerous they are. Assigning a risk level to each vulnerability (from low-risk to critical), risk scores are ideal for vulnerability assessments and reports.
Accepted risk score: You can use this metric to acknowledge a risk but not necessarily prioritize or act on it. Acceptance of a vulnerability can be done for different reasons, depending on the organization. For example, organizations that know that their security controls can prevent risks from escalating will feel more at ease accepting certain risks. Also, in some cases, the costs and resources to mitigate risks may undercut more important benefits and profits.
CVSS score: The CVSS score, a standardized and commonly used framework, assigns a numerical value to every vulnerability. Remember that CVSS scores aren't actual measurements of risk because they don't consider the specific contexts of your organization. That said, by giving you a starting point on severity, they can greatly help the vulnerability prioritization process.
Vulnerability age: This metric calculates the time between when a vulnerability was publicly disclosed and when it was discovered in your cloud environment. It can help your security teams come up with SLA-compliant and risk-based remediation efforts.
Vulnerability remediation and validation performance metrics
Without the right remediation performance metrics, there’s no way to know whether fixes are successful and whether dangerous vulnerabilities still lurk in your cloud. In other words, the following metrics will tell you how good you are at eradicating vulnerabilities.
Mean time to remediate (MTTR) measures how long it takes to patch up a vulnerability post-detection and prioritization. A fast MTTR is a sign of a healthy and proactive vulnerability management program.
Vulnerability remediation coverage helps check how many vulnerabilities addressed by your tools and teams were successfully fixed. As you might have guessed, it’s extra important to achieve high remediation coverage when there are high-risk vulnerabilities in your environment.
Vulnerability risk reduction measures the overall risk score associated with vulnerabilities in your environments. It’s also a good way to check whether remediation efforts have brought down active risks in your cloud.
Vulnerability remediation cost is ideal for making vulnerability management improvements because it measures the costs of every vulnerability remediation process.
Rate of recurrence reveals whether a previously remediated vulnerability has appeared again in the same cloud asset. If the answer is yes, then your cloud security teams have to get under the hood of compromised cloud assets to tweak configurations and settings.
How Wiz can boost your vulnerability management program
Vulnerability management metrics are crucial. But the secret to a strong vulnerability management program is to avoid disparate and disjointed processes and opt for a unified solution.
Wiz’s vulnerability management platform has all you need to discover, prioritize, remediate, validate, and report dangerous vulnerabilities—from code to runtime. We provide and use cutting-edge vulnerability management metrics and a thorough vulnerability catalog to make sure that you have comprehensive insights, allowing you to improve and automate your vulnerability management program and take it to the next level.
Get a demo today to test out Wiz’s vulnerability management powers.
Uncover Vulnerabilities Across Your Clouds and Workloads
Learn why CISOs at the fastest growing companies choose Wiz to secure their cloud environments.
