From Visibility to Action
While security teams have the visibility they need to identify cloud vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks, the manual process of remediating them is not only time-consuming but also ineffective, resulting in a high number of incidents, recurring issues, and an unmanageable risk backlog.
Recent analysis by Mandiant highlighted that the time to exploit vulnerabilities has dropped dramatically—from 32 days to just 5. This highlights the urgency for organizations to rethink their approach to cloud risk remediation to outpace attackers and stay ahead of the curve.
Advancements in AI, the rapid adoption of DevOps systems, and other innovations have paved the way for a fresh approach for resolving cloud risks. Our most recent guide covers the core capabilities we believe are essential for an efficient risk resolution plan.
Here’s a quick summary of what the guide covers:
- Effort-based prioritization. Effort-based prioritization is an effective strategy to address the largest number of risks with the least amount of changes. It enables security teams to strike the right balance between effort and impact in order to keep the attack surface under control.
- Automated Root Cause Analysis. Automating root cause analysis not only saves security teams time, it ensures the best solution is implemented. It allows security teams to group problems based on common fixes, helping them implement fixes that have the greatest impact on reducing the risk backlog.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI). Instead of spending weeks in meetings doing manual code review, AI algorithms/agents can rapidly identify the best possible path to resolution – whether that’s remediation or mitigation. And in cases where an IaC-based fix is the answer, AI can generate replacement code.
- Security as Code (SaC). By leveraging the same (IaC) tools that introduced the problem to remediate it, security teams can increase overall efficiency and collaboration with the teams responsible for the fix. This approach also reduces the likelihood of human error and recurring risks.
- Mobilization of Mitigating Controls. More than 50% of the time, remediation isn’t an option (e.g. patch is not available, legacy system can’t support an upgrade, etc.) In these scenarios, leveraging cloud-native services and existing controls becomes crucial to reducing risk.
- Remediation Validation. Trust but verify, every time. Once a fix is implemented, it’s important to make sure the issue was successfully resolved. This allows security teams to close the remediation loop and move on the next set of problems with confidence.
Many organizations are focusing on building remediation and mitigation plans to fight the ever-growing risk backlog. Risk resolution is a new, efficient approach introduced by industry leaders to help security teams stay ahead of the curve and reduce the attack surface (it’s time we’ve moved beyond visibility and prioritization).
Similar to your incident response plan, critical vulnerabilities and risks should be handled in a timely manner. Check out the full guide that covers the core capabilities to build an efficient and scalable risk resolution plan.
Interested in seeing how ZEST helps organizations take down vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks? Reach out to our team to schedule a live demo.
