5 Ways to Make the Most Out of Your Vulnerability Management Tool

So, you’ve purchased a vulnerability management tool. Now what?

First of all, kudos! 🙌 Investing in security solutions is a major step towards a mature security future for your organization. 

But now comes the important part: making sure that your new tool is utilized to its maximum potential.

In this article, we uncover all the ways in which you will be able to make the most of your new investment. By ticking all of these boxes, you will set your organization and teams up for success.

Listen: LTAPod #7: Vulnerability Management – What? When? How?

Ensure adoption across teams

The worst outcome of investing in a great solution is having it deployed by one team while other teams brush it off in favor of legacy solutions. This is understandable; change is difficult for engineering. Every team has at least one expert who knows everything about everything and is wary of new ways of doing work. Hopefully, throughout the buyer journey, you have brought in these people to help evaluate the possible solutions, so they have some idea of what’s in store for them once the rollout comes around. Ideally, your vendor has experience in working closely with these people to get the best results.

Whatever the case may be, your end goal is to ensure tool adoption across and within teams, so that your solution set isn’t fractured. This may require training, mandated adoption policies, timelines for migration, etc. Adoption doesn’t happen in a frictionless instant. Patience and consideration of your team and other teams' needs are key. By listening to and accommodating these, you can keep employee engagement high even through times of change.

Practice good vendor relationship management

“SaaS vendor management includes building relationships with strategic vendors, managing your application use, optimizing spend and reporting on value.” - Zylo, The Complete Guide to SaaS Vendor Management

Practicing good Vendor Relationship Management, or Supplier Relationship Management, will allow you to take advantage of the best support offered by your vendor.

If you’ve purchased a vulnerability management tracking tool rather than going down the open source route, then make sure to take advantage of all the support offered to you. You were sold a solution that fits your business, but that’s not to say that the other features of the product should be skipped over. Ask for demos of the other features available that you are not leveraging yet. For a small commitment of time, you are likely to discover something new that, even if you don’t implement it, could inspire some other functionality within your own DevSecOps processes.

Consider your stack

The majority of unified or risk-based vulnerability management tools have been built with stackability and integrations with a variety of other tools in mind. While you may have already integrated your current scanning tools, you never want to sit still. It pays to look at the other deep integrations that your vulnerability management tool offers. These integrations are supplied as they represent what other companies are using in their own stack. By drawing up an evaluation matrix with each tool listed, you have a living document that can be a part of your DevSecOps review process, even if you choose not to grow or change your tool stack after your first round of evaluations. Likewise, if you want to change to a new vendor for one of your scanners, ensure that your vulnerability management tool will support anyone you pick.

Stay on top of product updates

Just like your own software products evolve and change, so too do your vulnerability management tools. While you might have auto-updates turned on for incoming new vulnerabilities and critical patches, what about new features? Instead of ignoring product updates, stay on top of them. Software evolves for a reason, typically because the market demands it. If you aren’t staying on top of updates then you are not staying in touch with what the rest of the software development space is using to help their vulnerability management program. On updates, ensure you ask for a demo of the new functionality, uncover any gotchas that might need further examination, and have an internal discussion led by your external discovery about whether this is something that could assist in your own processes.

And if your vulnerability management tool’s team reaches out wanting to sell you on something new? Hear them out, even if you don’t have the current budget for anything new. If information and careful evaluation only cost time, and the learning might be invaluable, you already have a more significant ROI.

Listen: LTAPod #24: Using Threat Intelligence to Optimize your AppSecOps Program

Train multiple administrators

“In the future, we hope to see security teams find more ways to lay out clear expectations for the other members of their organization, and continue to adopt innovative technologies for scanning and code reviews to improve speed and quality of development cycles.” - Johnathan Hunt, vice president of security at GitLab

Security doesn’t just involve the security team—it involves security advocates in other parts of the organization, and having a single reference point of knowledge within a company is never a position you want to find yourself in. Training your team to use your new vulnerability management tool is one thing, but you also need to train multiple administrators for ownership of the product. This is typically security champions on teams, preferably people who you think will be at the company for a few years more. Investing in these people as administrators and owners of the tool will ensure that there is a diversified knowledge base should someone happen to leave the company abruptly.

Ensure ROI with ArmorCode

At ArmorCode, we support our customers throughout the post-sales journey to make the most of our platform, 180+ integrations, and the greater security community. When our customers win, we all win. If you are ready to chat about DevSecOps and unified vulnerability management across applications, infrastructure, and cloud then make sure to get in touch. Ask us for a demo to see what our platform can do for you.