Vulnerability Management Buyers' Guide 2024

State of the market: Vulnerability management tools identify, categorize, prioritize, and help you resolve vulnerabilities in your organization’s network, such as out-of-date or unpatched software or misconfigurations.

The vulnerability management market was valued at USD 15.9 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.2% over the next 8 years, reaching a value USD 34.7 billion by 2032.
Growth is being driven by an increase in high-profile vulnerability exploits worldwide, strict regulatory requirements, and the adoption of BYOD and IoT devices that are complex to manage and patch manually.
- At the time of writing, 33,579 vulnerabilities have been published this year—an increase of 37% compared to 2023.
- While only a small number of these have been exploited (1,036 of the 33,579 vulnerabilities), it only takes one successful exploit to compromise an organization. In the case of software vulnerabilities, all organizations using the affected software can be impacted by an exploit.
- 63% of applications have flaws in first-party code and 70% contain flaws in third-party code.
- 70.8% of organizations have security debt, i.e., a flaw that’s been sitting unremediated for more than a year, and almost half of organizations have high-severity security debt.

In this guide, we’ll give you our top recommendations on how to choose the right vulnerability management provider. We’ll also cover what features to look for in a vulnerability management tool, the benefits and challenges of implementing one, and the future trends that you should keep tabs on within the vulnerability management space.

Our Recommendations: As you research different vulnerability management tools, here are a few recommendations to bear in mind that will help you choose the right solution for your business:

For large and growing enterprises: Choose a solution that can scale to handle a large amount of devices/networks/infrastructure and integrates easily with the rest of the tools in your security stack (esp. your patch management tool). Plus, most vulnerability management tools offer lots of automation—use this!
For overburdened teams: Find a solution that offers effective alert triage and prioritization, and which you can fine-tune to your environment. Security teams often suffer from alert fatigue, which occurs when dealing with a large number of “symptom” alerts that don’t solve the root problem. Focusing on the most critical vulnerabilities first can help reduce this.
For easy deployment: Map out all your assets before comparing vulnerability management tools. This will help you understand the scope of the task and make sure you’re choosing a tool that will cover your whole environment. It’ll also help you prioritize vulnerabilities based on dependent assets that could be affected during a breach.

How Vulnerability Management Works: Vulnerability management tools can either be deployed as on-prem software, cloud-based services, or physical appliances. No matter the deployment model, most of these tools provide a web-based management console from which you can view vulnerability reports and configure the solution to run scans. These could be general system, network, and other IT infrastructure scans, or more specific scans, e.g., on certain IP addresses, web apps, or URLs. The broader the scan, the longer it will take to complete.

During a scan, the solution identifies vulnerabilities, such as outdated software, misconfigurations, or unauthorized endpoints that are accessing your network. The solution then assigns each vulnerability a risk score and prioritizes them, enabling you to take action to remediate them. It also catalogues the results of each scan so that you can easily access real-time and historical vulnerability reports.

Some solutions also offer automated or guided remediation for more simple vulnerabilities, e.g., automatically deploying software patches.

Benefits Of Vulnerability Management: There are three key use cases for implementing a vulnerability management tool: security and risk management, compliance, and operational efficiency.

First and foremost, a vulnerability management tool can hugely improve your security posture.

Vulnerability management tools continuously scan for potential threats and automate certain remediation processes, giving you advanced warning so you can fix any issues before they can be exploited by attackers.
These tools can streamline risk management, identifying the greatest risks for you to work through in order of priority.
Vulnerability management tools also allow you to track each system’s security status in real-time, giving you in-depth visibility over your security posture at any given time.

Second, a vulnerability management tool can help you achieve (and prove!) compliance with regulatory data privacy and protection standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001.

You can configure scans in such a way as to achieve compliance, and you can use the reports generated by your vulnerability management tool to prove compliance.
Proving that you have a vulnerability management solution in place and that you respond to its findings and recommendations can also help lower your cybersecurity insurance premium.

Finally, a good vulnerability management solution can help you improve operational efficiency.

Vulnerability management tools automate routine security tasks such as scanning and patching systems.
This frees up your team’s time to analyze scan results, action more complex remediations, and spend time on strategic planning to improve your security posture longer term.

Common Vulnerability Management Challenges: When you implement a vulnerability management tool, you might find yourself facing some common challenges. Here’s how to overcome them:

False positives: As with all types of scanning tool, there’s a possibility that your vulnerability management tool could send you false positives. A high volume of false alerts can lead to alert fatigue and make it difficult for your team to identify genuine threats, causing them to spend time on non-issues. We recommend choosing a solution with a low false positive rate and working with the vendor to tune the solution to your environment during deployment.
Patch management: It’s likely that most of the vulnerabilities your solutions find will be caused by outdated software. When a software vulnerability is found, you need to patch all the systems running that software—this can take a lot of time and effort. We recommend choosing a tool that offers automated patch management and deployment, or which integrates with your existing patch management tool, so you can apply patches to all devices simultaneously.
Large number of vulnerabilities: In the early stages of implementing a vulnerability management tool, it’s likely that the tool will uncover an overwhelming number of vulnerabilities, which can take a long time to make sense of and respond to. We recommend choosing a tool that triages and prioritizes vulnerabilities so you can start responding to the most critical issues right away.
Coverage: If your organization has a complex, sprawling infrastructure with lots of different device types, you might end up choosing a solution that doesn’t actually support all your different assets. This lack of coverage can lead to vulnerabilities going unfixed. We recommend making a list of all your asset types before comparing tools, so you know what you need to protect, and then choosing a solution that covers as many assets as possible.

Best Vulnerability Management Providers: Our team of cybersecurity analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of vulnerability management solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

Features Checklist: When comparing vulnerability management solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Asset inventory and discovery: The solution should maintain an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all your IT assets, including hardware, software, and network components. This visibility will help you prioritize vulnerabilities based on asset dependencies.
Comprehensive scanning: The solution should regularly scan systems, applications, and networks for known vulnerabilities. This could include a combination of automated vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and manual assessments.
Continuous monitoring: As well as scanning for known vulnerabilities, the solution should help you detect and respond to new vulnerabilities and changes in your environment. This might include monitoring security advisories, threat intelligence feeds, and industry best practices, and implementing ML-driven behavioral analysis.
Vulnerability prioritization: The solution should prioritize vulnerabilities based on their severity, the criticality of the affected asset, and the potential impact on your organization’s operations.
Patch management: You should be able to automate the process of applying security patches to mitigate known vulnerabilities within operating systems and applications.
Configuration management: The tool should regularly review and help you update configurations for all systems, apps, and network devices to align them with industry best practices.
Automated remediation: You should be able to configure workflows that instruct the solution to automatically remediation certain identified vulnerabilities (e.g., by applying a security patch).

Future Trends: There are three main evolutions that we expect to see in the vulnerability management space over the next few years.

First, with the big shift towards cloud infrastructure, we can expect more vulnerability management tools to shift their focus to be more compatible with cloud services. This may also make cloud-based vulnerability management tools more popular than their on-prem or appliance-based counterparts.

Second, thanks to automated scanning and recent advancements in AI and machine learning, we expect these tools to become even quicker at detecting vulnerabilities—and not just known CVEs, but also anomalous or high-risk user or endpoint behavior.

Finally, we expect vulnerability management tools to further utilize AI to analyze threat intelligence data and threat landscape trends, in order to prioritize risks more effectively.

Further Reading: You can find all of our articles on vulnerability management in our Security Monitoring Hub.

No time to browse? Here are a few articles we think you’ll like:

Shortlist: The Top 10 Vulnerability Management Solutions
Blog: Vulnerability Management: Why It’s Important And What Features To Look For
Podcast: Andrei Hinodache On XDR As The Answer To Unified Security
Podcast: Glen Pendley On “Left Of Boom” Security And The Inspiration Behind The Tenable One Platform

Vulnerability Management Buyers’ Guide 2024

How to choose the right vulnerability management software.