By Dr. Deepak Kumar, Founder and president, Adaptiva

The Year Ahead: Adaptiva’s Top Vulnerability Management Predictions for 2020

This year, cyberattacks have penetrated even the mightiest of companies with the most sophisticated defenses, proving that despite incredible spending in the security sector, bad actors remain a step ahead. Data breaches have become normalized. In 2020, vulnerability management will take on a far bigger role in both preventing attacks and helping to minimize damage when they occur.

Fortifying the Defensive Line

One of the big issues companies face is dealing with the overwhelming number of threats and vulnerabilities. Automated vulnerability management solutions have been introduced to offload some of the burden of manual remediation, but up to this point, they have not been widely adopted because of the strain that they put on networks during patching and remediation and the limits of their capabilities. In 2020, this changes. Instant, automated remediation on a large scale will finally emerge for two reasons:

• Distribution models are changing: Traditionally, vulnerability management has been a chore for big networks. If a bunch of patches needed to be sent out at the same time, it would kill business processes and traffic because of the strain placed on the network. In 2020, peer-to-peer distribution will immediately deliver patches, configurations, and updates securely across distributed networks with no negative impact on performance.
  

• Fixes are improving: In 2020, we also will see automated remediation products hit the market that are far more advanced in terms of the number and complexity of vulnerabilities they can address. For example, new solutions utilize NIST's Open Vulnerability Assessment Language (OVAL) rules and make it easy to integrate with other systems, such as ServiceNow. Additionally, they gain the ability to quickly create fixes without coding and instantly deploy them network-wide. Collectively, these advancements mean that diagnosis and rapid remediation of vulnerabilities will be exponentially better than ever before, making it possible for teams to offload a big chunk of remediation so that manual efforts can be devoted to solving the most complex problems.
  

Going on the Offensive

As insurance companies try to skirt paying for the impact of breaches (Merck and Mondelēz are experiencing this nightmare), corporations will increasingly seek to improve protection by placing greater focus on vulnerability management. In 2020:

• Preemptive vulnerability management takes off: Throughout 2019, IT teams were constantly playing catch-up. With the substantial improvements in automated vulnerability management, teams will finally be able to get ahead of vulnerabilities, solving issues before breaches occur.
  

• Rapid scanning becomes the norm: The ability to scan every endpoint will take only minutes instead of hours in 2020. Additionally, continuous scanning, instead of something that happens once per day or week, is possible. This is a game changer when it comes to keeping endpoints properly configured and up to date.
  

• SLA's get an adjustment: Typically, Level 5 vulnerabilities are required to be fixed in 24 hours based on service level agreements. As vulnerability management speeds up and runs continuously, the time period for fixes at every level will shrink dramatically.
  

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About the Author

Dr. Kumar is responsible for the overseeing the company’s ability to execute on its strategic product vision in the endpoint management and security space. Prior to Microsoft, he was a group manager for IP Telephony products at Nortel.

Dr. Kumar has received five patents related to his work on SMS 2003 at Microsoft and has written more than 50 publications, including a book on Windows programming. While at Microsoft, Dr. Kumar also authored the Thinkweek paper for Bill Gates that became Project Greenwich, now known as Microsoft Office Communications Server / Lync.