How Regular Scanning Can Increase Your Security Posture

This week’s article aims to build on last weeks piece, discussing how regular Vulnerability Assessments blended with Penetration Testing can help improve your organisations security posture.

The dynamic nature of today’s business infrastructure requires continuous security scanning to defend against the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Constant application updates and changes to application and system configurations can introduce vulnerabilities and leave your organisation susceptible to an attack, even if your security controls are being kept up to date.

Every time one of your devices connects to the internet, malicious individuals have the opportunity to take advantage of the vulnerabilities which exist in your security.

Vulnerability Assessment helps you defend against these opportunistic attacks by scanning your networks and infrastructure for all known vulnerabilities, identifying any potential weaknesses and pitfalls in your security and enabling you to remediate them.

Industry best practice dictates that Vulnerability Scanning should not be used in isolation as it only identifies known vulnerabilities in your security. Instead, Vulnerability Assessments should be pursued on a quarterly or monthly basis and blended with Penetration Testing once a year and after each major version change to significantly increase your organisations security posture and reduce the threat of a potential breach.

There are numerous benefits to be realised through conducting regular Vulnerability Assessments. These include:

• Comprehensive Insights - Gain comprehensive insights into the information you are broadcasting.
• Regular Scanning - Highlight new threats on a regular basis.
• Identify Vulnerabilities - Find out which of your systems are most vulnerable to attack.
• Discover Weaknesses - Discover weaknesses in your internal networks enabling you to fix them.
• Minimise Disruption - Protect your websites and web applications from malicious hackers and minimise disruption.
• Fully Managed Service - SES provides Vulnerability Assessment as a fully managed service, minimising your costs and administration.
• Protect Clients and Customers - Prove you take Information Security seriously by protecting your clients and customers.
• Detailed Reports - Detailed yet simplified reports, enabling you to easily identify key vulnerabilities.
• Minimise Your Attack Surface - Understand your attack surface and minimise it.

With business environments becoming increasingly complex, Vulnerability Assessments can produce an overwhelming amount of information about your networks and potential vulnerabilities which can be difficult to dissect.

To simplify the process of identifying potential weaknesses in order to begin remediation, SES utilises a traffic light system in Vulnerability Assessment reports which demonstrates the immediacy of threats identified by the scan. This enables you to quickly and easily identify the most imperative weaknesses and begin to remediate.

Next week SES will be delving into Software Escrow protection to continue our series on improving your organisations business continuity.

To discuss how introducing a blended approach to security testing can improve your organisations defences against malicious individuals and cyber threats, please get in touch to speak to one of our specialists.

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