Page 296 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

The burden of remediating a vast number of vulnerabilities can also have an impact on organizations’
security resilience. Teams that are stretched too thin are more likely to take a scattered, non-strategic,
reactive approach to remediation, causing them to overlook critical vulnerabilities and delay fixes. This
approach leaves organizations exposed and can lead to harmful outcomes, including more security
incidents, financial losses, and an erosion of stakeholder and customer trust.

For organizations to maintain a strong security posture and set their teams up for success, they must
adopt proactive exposure management strategies. To do this, organizations should implement a plan that
prioritizes vulnerabilities based on business impact, streamlines workflows, and improves collaboration
among fixing teams.

Prioritize Vulnerabilities Based on Business Impact

Many security organizations focus their efforts on identifying vulnerabilities, using an average of eight
security scanning tools to do so. Since these tools provide limited context and visibility into risks, they
often just add to the noise that security teams need to manage. This can cause teams to focus on less
critical vulnerabilities while more significant ones remain unaddressed.

Only focusing on identifying vulnerabilities causes organizations not to be able to differentiate between
low-impact vulnerabilities and high-impact vulnerabilities that require immediate action. Beyond missing
important vulnerabilities, using non-strategic, manual methods based on guesswork to fix the low-impact
issues wastes valuable time and resources that could be spent on remediating critical vulnerabilities.

Implementing a risk-based exposure management strategy using AI-driven technology can enable
organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and prioritize vulnerabilities that pose the greatest
business risk. A more strategic approach helps provide relief for fixing by zeroing in on pressing issues.

Streamline Workflows with Automation

Manual processes for vulnerability remediation lead to significant inefficiencies. Developers and other
teams contributing to remediation efforts waste valuable time manually identifying the most critical
vulnerabilities, assigning remediation steps to the appropriate teams and coordinating the fixes.
Particularly when there’s a large number of vulnerabilities involved, this approach can quickly become
overwhelming.

According to Seemplicity’s 2024 Remediation Operations Report, nearly 60% of organizations still
incorporate manual processes in their remediation efforts. Relying too much on individual contributors
can disrupt workflow consistency and efficiency. Given that many security teams operate with constrained
resources and limited staff, it’s almost impossible to keep up with the volume of vulnerabilities that need
to be addressed.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 296
Copyright © 2025, Cyber Defense Magazine. All rights reserved worldwide.