Building a Vulnerability Management Program: Best Practices and Tools

Vulnerability management has become more complex than ever. Modern IT environments are highly dynamic, with a constant influx of new assets, cloud services, APIs, and third-party integrations. Maintaining visibility over every component becomes a daunting challenge as these ecosystems expand. Many organizations find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of vulnerabilities identified by automated tools, leading to alert fatigue and decision paralysis.

Resource constraints further complicate the issue, forcing teams to juggle immediate security needs with long-term strategies. This growing complexity often leaves critical vulnerabilities unaddressed, exposing organizations to heightened risks.

Combatting these challenges requires a structured vulnerability management program that prioritizes threats effectively, allocates resources strategically, and aligns security efforts with broader business objectives. A well-designed program can transform vulnerability management from a reactive process to a proactive strategy by focusing on visibility, risk prioritization, and streamlined remediation.

Developing a vulnerability management program is not easy, as most organizations have a vast scope and complexity of vulnerabilities they must address. This is partially due to the complexity of their IT environments, which are constantly evolving, with new assets, devices, and applications introduced regularly, especially if they actively use Cloud technologies or containerized coding. Vulnerabilities may lurk right under their noses without any visibility.

Even for organizations with visibility, there is still difficulty in managing the findings in an effective and organized manner. Without the right tooling and processes, it can be a losing effort.

The problem in vulnerability management starts with achieving complete visibility across all assets in an organization’s IT environment. Modern ecosystems are growing increasingly dynamic, and tracking everything from APIs and cloud services to legacy systems is a monumental task. New assets are added constantly, while older ones often linger, creating a complex web of endpoints and applications that security teams must oversee.

Compounding this issue is the rise of shadow IT—unauthorized or unmanaged applications and devices that bypass standard security controls. Introduced without oversight, these assets can harbor critical vulnerabilities, making them attractive targets for attackers. Without a comprehensive view of the entire IT landscape, organizations risk leaving these hidden weaknesses unmonitored and unaddressed.

These difficulties have far-reaching consequences for vulnerability management efforts. Any vulnerabilities within untracked systems often go unnoticed, creating blind spots that attackers quickly exploit. The absence of a complete inventory makes it difficult to accurately assess the overall risk posture, hindering the prioritization of remediation efforts. This increases the likelihood of breaches and wastes valuable resources addressing less critical vulnerabilities while high-risk issues remain exposed.

Even for organizations with good visibility, dealing with the discovered vulnerabilities is still challenging. Many use automated tooling to help discover and track issues by scanning and detecting weaknesses across systems far faster than a human ever could. However, these tools often produce an overwhelming number of alerts, many of which are low-priority or irrelevant, especially with less mature tools. This flood of information leads to “alert fatigue,” where security teams become desensitized to notifications or struggle to distinguish critical issues from less pressing ones.

Existing processes may lack effective prioritization frameworks, leaving teams wasting valuable time addressing minor vulnerabilities while truly high-risk threats remain unresolved. The longer these threats remain unresolved, the more exposed the organization is to potential breaches.

Compounding the problem is the reality of limited resources. Most security teams operate under tight constraints, juggling vulnerability management alongside other critical responsibilities. The absence of a risk-based prioritization process makes it even harder to allocate time and effort effectively. This lack of focus stretches teams thin and delays remediation for the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat to the organization.

While the problems with vulnerability management sound daunting, they can be addressed entirely by developing a comprehensive management program. Such a program serves as a blueprint for tackling the complexities of modern IT environments by establishing clear processes for visibility, prioritization, and remediation. By centralizing these efforts, a well-defined program helps security teams stay ahead of potential threats and ensures that resources are allocated where they matter most.

These efforts can be further supported by aligning vulnerability management practices with organizational goals. This creates a unified approach to security based on better buy-in from stakeholders, making it more likely for them to act on vulnerabilities promptly rather than sitting on them until it is convenient.

Effective vulnerability management programs start with establishing best practices. These practices help ensure comprehensive oversight and proactive risk mitigation throughout the development lifecycle.

Continuous asset discovery is one of the first practices necessary to uplevel a program. It allows organizations to maintain an up-to-date inventory of all systems, including shadow IT and third-party integrations. With a complete view of the attack surface, security teams can then implement risk-based prioritization methods, focusing on vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat based on exploitability and potential business impact.

Once organizations understand their attack surface, the next step is to evaluate it efficiently. Integrating vulnerability management directly into CI/CD pipelines allow teams to identify and resolve issues early in the development lifecycle. This reduces the cost and complexity of post-deployment fixes and embeds security into the broader organizational culture. Collaboration across IT, security, and development teams builds on this, fostering open communication and shared responsibility for remediation efforts.

No process is complete without a critical self-check. Regular evaluation and adaptation of the program ensure that it remains effective, helping it adapt to evolving threats and changing business needs. It prevents the processes from becoming stale and serving as a checkbox rather than providing actual value.

An effective program is more than a process alone; it also requires the right tools to accomplish the job. Automated scanning tools provide continuous visibility into vulnerabilities across all assets, ensuring no endpoint goes unchecked. When evaluating tools, considering the level of false positives makes all the difference in the value a tool will deliver. Accurate tools save time and enhance accuracy, identifying risks that manual processes might miss. However, tools with high rates of false positives leave teams wasting time on investigations that turn out to be nothing, taking them away from more valuable tasks.

Effective tools also offer risk scoring, which adds another layer of efficiency by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on factors like exploitability and potential business impact. This enables security teams to concentrate their efforts on the most critical threats, avoiding wasted resources on low-priority issues.

Tools also affect how well vulnerability management integrates into development processes. Not every tool can integrate with existing workflows, adding additional steps to put findings in the hands of developers. Advanced tools integrate with existing workflows to further streamline vulnerability management, making it a seamless part of daily operations and placing findings directly in developers’ hands. This allows them to deal with findings as part of the dev lifecycle, which is far more cost-effective and less disruptive than waiting until after release.

Probely, now a Snyk Business, makes it easier than ever to implement a comprehensive program. With robust tools for continuous asset discovery, Probely ensures organizations have full visibility into their IT environment, from known systems to hidden shadow assets. Once assets are discovered, Probely’s automated vulnerability scanning helps development teams identify the issues that matter to them, providing actionable insights and prioritization risks based on exploitability and business impact.

Probley helps developers by integrating seamlessly into the existing tools, CI/CD pipelines, and workflows they already use. This integration makes Probely a direct part of the development lifecycle, putting findings directly in the developer’s hands. These findings cover everything from security misconfigurations to code-level vulnerabilities, empowering developers to address issues early and efficiently. By embedding security into the development process, Probely reduces the cost and complexity of fixing vulnerabilities post-deployment and fosters a culture of proactive risk management. This seamless integration ensures that security becomes a natural extension of development workflows, enabling teams to deliver secure applications without slowing down innovation.

With Probely, organizations can transform their vulnerability management processes, achieving better security outcomes with less effort. Schedule a demo today to see how Probely can transform your organization's vulnerability management program.