Editor’s note: In our previous blog post, we talked about a workflow for managing and prioritizing vulnerabilities in the cloud. In this blog post, we will focus on strategies for remediating vulnerabilities.
The cloud has turned security on its head. The risk of lateral movement across code, cloud environments, and everything in between—driven by undetected vulnerabilities—creates significant challenges for security practitioners and CISOs. They must tackle the complex task of identifying, addressing, and containing these vulnerabilities across an ever-expanding attack surface and the entire app development lifecycle. When you consider how quickly exposure can lead to a breach, in just 8 hours or even less, teams can no longer take a traditional and siloed approach to vulnerability management. Vulnerability analysts and cloud security stakeholders across the organization need a holistic "cloud-native" approach to vulnerability management that spans the entire code-to-cloud lifecycle and supports rapid remediation workflows everywhere.
In this blog, we will cover best practices for vulnerability remediation in the cloud and demonstrate how Wiz can help you streamline remediation workflows. We will focus first on remediating at the root, then across the lifecycle, and lastly reducing MTTR with guidance and automations.
Start with the root-cause
Code-to-cloud and one-click remediation
Without a complete view of vulnerabilities across your cloud app and services lifecycle, the true risk of any vulnerability cannot be properly assessed and therefore remediated. Wiz offers a holistic view to vulnerability remediation across code-to-cloud, offering actionable vulnerability insights from the start of the application development process through runtime. With the code-to cloud pipeline feature, you can quickly assess and remediate vulnerabilities at the root in the order of urgency and potential impact to the business with clear visualization of each CVE. Furthermore, this helps democratize and extend vulnerability remediation best practices to development teams by clearly visualizing code-to-cloud paths with exact remediation guidance. Not only does Wiz provide visibility into the where the vulnerability originates, but Wiz also offers one-click remediation in code which allows you to implement corrective actions that include pull requests to remediate the vulnerability directly at the source.
Remediate at scale by fixing vulnerabilities at the base image level
Base image remediation refers to the process of identifying, assessing, and fixing vulnerabilities within a base image used. By focusing remediation on base images, teams can better identify, prioritize, and scale the remediation of vulnerable images and their respective affected container images. This enables you to address the vulnerabilities at their root cause and prevent their widespread use.
In Wiz, we added a Base Image Filter directly to the Vulnerability Findings page which allows you to change the perspective and group by Base Image to easily view the list of affected container images. With this, you can reduce remediation effort as you only need to fix vulnerabilities once in the base image.
Remediate across the app lifecycle
Patch recommendation for effective remediation
A single package or library can result in hundreds if not thousands of vulnerabilities in the environment. To help customers remediate vulnerabilities much more effectively, we created a patch-centric view of vulnerabilities so you can focus on patching the software that results in the most vulnerabilities. Patch Recommendations aggregate all patches per specific resource (package, OS, library) so you could identify all the vulnerabilities across the environment that would be fixed from patching it in their environment. This can also be extended to your code repositories and CI/CD pipelines so you can view patch recommendations in the code and build phase and reduce the number of vulnerabilities that reach your cloud environment.
Reduce MTTR with AI-guidance and automations
Accelerate remediation with AI-powered guidance
Generative AI has been a powerful catalyst for many security organizations, one of the use cases AI can help with is generating remediation guidance to accelerate vulnerability remediation. Wiz’s AI-powered remediation 2.0 leverages both the power of GenAI and the Wiz Research team’s specialized knowledge in understanding complex attack paths in the cloud to allow you to remediate toxic combinations related to vulnerabilities quickly. This allows Wiz to generate granular and contextual remediation guidance for Wiz Issues based on the remediation strategy of your choice. You can learn more about AI-powered remediation here.
Operationalizing remediation workflows with integrations
Wiz Integration (WIN) platform integrations include over 100 out-of-the-box integrations like ServiceNow VR and empowers customers to streamline vulnerability management by embedding Wiz’s enriched cloud context directly into existing workflows. For example, ServiceNow VR can pull in Wiz's cloud vulnerability data—complete with critical context such as public exposure, exploitability, and runtime validation—allowing vulnerability response teams to triage and remediate high-risk issues quickly. You can also streamline vulnerability data directly into your S3 buckets and Snowflake tables through our reporting capabilities or leverage issue automation to notify responsible team members by email or even open a Jira ticket directly from your Wiz platform - ensuring timely responses and effective patch management.
A Cloud-first Approach to Vulnerability Remediation
Wiz’s cloud-first approach to vulnerability management is built on the inarguable premise that the multi-cloud environment’s expanding attack surface requires a democratization of vulnerability assessment and remediation. Architected around the Wiz Security Graph, Wiz provides vulnerability remediation workflows that scale across code-to-cloud domains and support holistic fixes that consider deep cloud context. The Vulnerability Management Dashboard helps stakeholders across development and security work together to address vulnerabilities where they are, in code, at runtime, and everywhere in between. Learn more about the cloud-first approach to Vulnerability Management, or join us for a live demo.
