Understand vulnerability management

12 minutes

Effectively identifying, assessing, and remediating endpoint weaknesses is pivotal in running a healthy security program and reducing organizational risk. Vulnerability management serves as an infrastructure for reducing organizational exposure, hardening endpoint surface area, and increasing organizational resilience.

Discover vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in real time with sensors and without the need for agents or periodic scans. It prioritizes vulnerabilities based on the threat landscape, detections in your organization, sensitive information on vulnerable devices, and business context.

Bridging the workflow gaps

Vulnerability management is built in, in real time, and cloud-powered. It's fully integrated with the Microsoft endpoint security stack, the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, and the application analytics knowledge base.

Vulnerability management is the industry's first solution to bridge the gap between security administration and IT administration during the remediation process. Create a security task or ticket by integrating with Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager.

Real-time discovery

To discover endpoint vulnerabilities and misconfiguration, vulnerability management uses the same agentless built-in Defender for Endpoint sensors to reduce cumbersome network scans and IT overhead.

It also provides:

Real-time device inventory - Devices onboarded to Defender for Endpoint automatically report and push vulnerability and security configuration data to the dashboard.
Visibility into software and vulnerabilities - Optics into the organization's software inventory and software changes like installations, uninstalls, and patches. Newly discovered vulnerabilities are reported with actionable mitigation recommendations for 1st and 3rd party applications.
Application runtime context - Visibility on application usage patterns for better prioritization and decision-making.
Configuration posture - Visibility into organizational security configuration or misconfigurations. Issues are reported in the dashboard with actionable security recommendations.

Intelligence-driven prioritization

Vulnerability management helps customers prioritize and focus on the weaknesses that pose the most urgent and the highest risk to the organization. It fuses security recommendations with dynamic threat and business context:

Exposing emerging attacks in the wild - Dynamically aligns the prioritization of security recommendations. Vulnerability management focuses on vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild and emerging threats that pose the highest risk.
Pinpointing active breaches - Correlates vulnerability management and EDR insights to prioritize vulnerabilities being exploited in an active breach within the organization.
Protecting high-value assets - Identify the exposed devices with business-critical applications, confidential data, or high-value users.

Seamless remediation

Vulnerability management allows security administrators and IT administrators to collaborate seamlessly to remediate issues.

Remediation requests sent to IT - Create a remediation task in Microsoft Intune from a specific security recommendation. We plan to expand this capability to other IT security management platforms.
Alternate mitigations - Gain insights on more mitigations, such as configuration changes that can reduce the risk associated with software vulnerabilities.
Real-time remediation status - Real-time monitoring of the status and progress of remediation activities across the organization.

Vulnerability management walk-through