Achieve Faster and Easier Vulnerability Remediation with Remediation Plans

Vulnerability remediation is one of the most challenging and critical aspects of vulnerability management. It involves not only identifying and prioritizing the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to your organization, but also implementing the appropriate solutions to mitigate or eliminate them. 

However, organizations typically face several challenges in this process such as:

• Lack of visibility and coordination among security, IT, and business teams
• Inefficient and inconsistent workflows and processes
• Limited resources and time
• Difficulty in tracking and measuring the progress of remediation outcomes

As part of NopSec’s new Cyber Threat and Exposure Management platform, we sought to address these challenges. We’re excited to announce a new workflow release that enables the creation and management of Remediation Plans. This is a brand new feature that will help you streamline and simplify your vulnerability remediation process, achieving better results.

What are Remediation Plans and How do they Work?

Remediation plans are a way to organize and manage your vulnerability remediation efforts in a centralized and collaborative way within the NopSec platform. No more spreadsheets or tedious meetings to discuss what needs remediation and why. These plans replace those manual and time consuming efforts with a centralized platform and process that bring all parties involved into the same space.

With remediation plans you can:

• Prioritize the vulnerabilities you think are important by leveraging the NopSec threat-based risk model and contextual risk. You can also further filter this your vulnerability list using the extensive querying capabilities within the platform.
• Create and assign remediation actions to the relevant teams or individuals based on your prioritization efforts. 
• Set expectations with your remediation teams for action completion.
• Monitor and update the status and progress of each remediation action, and get notified of any changes or issues.
• Generate reports and dashboards to share that show the remediation performance and impact of your efforts, and provide actionable insights and recommendations.
• Integrate with your existing tools and systems such as ticketing and orchestration systems to automate and optimize your remediation workflow.

What are the Benefits of Using Remediation Plans?

By using remediation plans you can optimize the use of your resources and time by prioritizing the most critical and relevant vulnerabilities and assigning them to the most suitable remediation team. 

You can also measure and track your remediation effort by using NopSec dashboards and Insights pages to provide visibility and accountability for the remediation actions.

Finally, improve your vulnerability management maturity and effectiveness by enabling collaboration across teams to learn and adapt from remediation outcomes.

How to Build a Remediation Plan?

With our new Remediation Plans, there are now crazy hoops to jump through to bring a plan to life. As part of a standardized remediation process, the creation and assign of these plans will naturally slot into your existing workflow. Below we have a step-by-step guide of how to do this in the NopSec CTEM platform:

• Once inside your NopSec platform instance, begin prioritizing your vulnerabilities within the Prioritize page.
• Create reports to save the specific prioritization queries and data you deem important.
• Create new remediation plans by selecting the vulnerabilities you’ve prioritized.
• Provide a name, description, and expected due date for this action to be completed by.
• Determine if this remediation plan should also be sent to a remote destination such as Jira, ServiceNow, or via Email. 
  • Note: All remediation plans create internal records for a centralized view and management of remediation plans.
• Assign the remediation plan to specific teams and review the reports and dashboards to monitor progress and outcomes.
• Determine if vulnerabilities can be remediated or if a compensating control is required by creating an Exception plan to track your business’ decisions for risk acceptance or marking items as false positive vulnerabilities.
• Share the remediation plan with your stakeholders and get feedback and suggestions.
• That’s it, you’re done.

This is how simple remediating vulnerabilities should be. Accepting anything less in your processes means you’re spending more time and resources than you need to.

Ready to Try Remediation Plans?

Remediation plans are a powerful tool and easy-to-use feature that will help you achieve faster and easier vulnerability remediation. As you identify your prioritization goals you can automate the creation of your remediation plans by scheduling when NopSec should run your prioritization queries and create remediation plans. 

Whether you are an Executive leader in the organization, or a Security Analyst, or an IT Remediation team member, remediation plans will help you improve your vulnerability management and reduce your risk exposure.

If you would like to see more of our Remediation Plans in action, join our monthly recurring platform walkthrough! You’ll get a no-pressure demo of the feature and platform. Our Director of Solutions Engineering will happily answer any questions you have about how this new functionality could improve your remediation efforts. Register for the webinar here!