Vulnerability Scanning: The Secret to a Good Night’s Sleep

As business leaders, you appreciate the importance of a strong and adaptable information security strategy. Given the increasing complexity of today’s computing infrastructures and the rising tide of cyber threats, it’s more important than ever to have an IT and cybersecurity environment fit for your unique business situation. That said, information security has historically been considered as a cost rather than an opportunity for business growth. As long as you have a strategic approach to IT budgeting, it becomes a value-adding best practice instead of a necessary evil. One of those key elements, cyber security, including vulnerability scanning, can make a big difference for your business.

What is Vulnerability Scanning?

Managing security vulnerabilities is a core responsibility for any IT team, whether internal or outsourced to a managed services provider (MSP). Critical vulnerabilities in your network can become a catalyst for serious data breaches and other cyberattacks, potentially crippling your business and taking your reputation down with it. Vulnerability scanning takes a proactive approach by identifying potential attack points that hackers might exploit, thereby giving you a chance to patch them before they become a serious issue. A vulnerability scan takes a comprehensive look at your network from the outside to find and isolate any possible security gaps.

The Benefits of Vulnerability Scanning

Identify Points of Failure Before Cybercriminals Do

Many businesses have highly complex computing infrastructure consisting of in-house and cloud-hosted assets, with everything spread across different systems. The number of endpoints, including laptops and smartphones, is also constantly growing. Employees use these devices every day to access company resources, with some being business-owned while others may be personal devices. In a nutshell, it can get complicated and complicated means that there are many potential single points of failure, which must be locked down before it’s too late. A vulnerability scan will help you identify these before cybercriminals can find and act on them.

Reduce the Impact of False Positives Early On

There’s no such thing as a perfect cybersecurity solution (it’s the holy grail of IT and our quest for it never ends). Every type of scan may detect a false positive by failing to authenticate correctly or misidentifying malicious code and unfamiliar protocols. The same goes for vulnerability scans, but being a proactive measure, it gives you time to isolate false positives quickly, so they don’t cause a disruption later on. By contrast, if you’re only employing reactive security measures, they’ll kick in much later and potentially block legitimate communications, leaving employees unable to do their jobs.

Meet Data Protection Policies and Obligations

Although vulnerability scanning isn’t the same as a full compliance check, it can help isolate any issues with your infrastructure that may constitute a breach of regulatory compliance. For example, if the scan finds an inadequately protected system that houses payment information, you may be in breach of PCI DSS regulations. A vulnerability scan will allow you to remediate the issue before you’re at risk of breaking the law. Moreover, many vulnerability scanning services can also be tailored to ensure your internal company policies, as well as national compliance directives, are being met.

Innovate Quickly, Without Adding Operational Risk

One of the core tenets of good cybersecurity hygiene is reducing complexity. However, adding new systems and devices will inevitably increase complexity. While you may be wondering how it’s possible to maintain cyber security hygiene and business growth at the time time, we assure you — there is a way. Vulnerability scanning will help prepare your infrastructure for future expansion and innovation by patching any security gaps. Think about it like you’re building an addition to your house. You want to check for load-bearing walls and structural support beams as you begin moving walls and growing the space, to make sure any weaknesses are addressed and structural integrity can be maintained. If we think about this using a business example, if a particular system or protocol is found to be vulnerable, the last thing you want to do is replicate it and add more points of failure. A scan helps expose the risks early on, so you can adapt and expand your infrastructure without adding risk.

Maintain Full Visibility Into Your Computing Assets

You can’t protect what you don’t know. A lack of visibility over computing assets is a common problem, given the huge number of apps, devices, and connections used in the typical office environment. The first stage of vulnerability scanning is building an inventory of all your hardware and software assets. This includes network devices, endpoints, servers, cloud-hosted virtual machines, operating systems, and all other data-bearing assets. An inventory will give administrators a complete line of sight into where the data lives, which users have access to it, and what controls are in place to protect it. Once the scan has built up a complete inventory, the vulnerability scanner will search for gaps in your security and evaluate the risks of each issue found through correlation with a threat database.

Charles IT provides external vulnerability scanning to help you proactively guard against data breaches and improve cybersecurity efficiency. Contact us today to schedule your first assessment.

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