Security Teams Are Drowning in Vulnerabilities 

Security leaders are constantly balancing priorities. New vulnerabilities emerge daily, and security teams are expected to identify, assess, and remediate them before attackers take advantage. The problem? Not all vulnerabilities are equal, yet too many organizations don’t have the visibility to see the difference. This is where vulnerability risk management fits in.

I’ve spent years working with organizations to strengthen their security posture, and I’ve seen the same issue over and over again: teams drowning in vulnerability scan results, struggling to keep up, and ultimately missing the real threats. The focus has been on patching as many vulnerabilities as possible, instead of fixing what actually puts the business at risk. That’s why we need to move beyond traditional vulnerability management (VM) and adopt a risk-based approach that prioritizes real-world threats.

Vulnerability Management vs. Vulnerability Risk Management 

Vulnerability Management (VM) is a well-known process: identify vulnerabilities, classify them by severity, patch what you can, and repeat. Despite being a necessary function, it has one critical flaw—it focuses on vulnerabilities in isolation rather than considering the actual risk they pose to the organization. 

That’s where Vulnerability Risk Management (VRM) changes the approach. Instead of prioritizing vulnerabilities based on generic severity scores alone, VRM factors in: 

• Likelihood of exploitation – Is this vulnerability actively being targeted by attackers? 

• Asset criticality – If exploited, would this impact a high-value system? 

• Real-world business impact – Would an exploit disrupt operations, expose sensitive data, or cause financial loss? 

By shifting to VRM, security teams can stop chasing vulnerabilities that pose little to no actual threat and start focusing on risk reduction. 

Why Security Leaders Are Making the Shift 

Security leaders aren’t adopting VRM because it’s a new trend. They’re adopting it because it works. 

The 2023 Citrix Bleed vulnerability (CVE-2023-4966) is a perfect example of why organizations can’t afford to rely solely on CVSS scores. This vulnerability was actively exploited against major enterprises that hadn’t updated their NetScaler devices. Yet some organizations didn’t prioritize it because their traditional vulnerability management processes didn’t flag it as “critical.” 

This is where VRM closes the gap. Instead of relying on outdated prioritization methods, security leaders are: 

• Using real-time threat intelligence to determine which vulnerabilities are actively being exploited. 

• Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on business impact, not just severity scores. 

• Reducing wasted effort on vulnerabilities that don’t pose an immediate risk. 

Security teams will always have more vulnerabilities to address than time to fix them. Therefore, the difference now is how they decide which ones matter most. 

How Organizations Are Making the Shift to VRM 

Shifting to VRM doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means improving the way security teams prioritize and address risk so they can focus on what actually matters. 

Successful security leaders are making the shift by: 

• Moving beyond CVSS scores and integrating real-world threat intelligence into their prioritization process. 

• Ensuring critical assets are protected first, instead of applying the same urgency to every vulnerability. 

• Improving collaboration between security and IT teams, reducing the time it takes to patch the most significant risks. 

This is where SAINT VRM makes a difference. Rather than relying on manual prioritization, SAINT VRM automates risk-based vulnerability management, using threat intelligence, business context, and exploitability data to highlight the vulnerabilities that demand immediate attention.  

How SAINT VRM closes the gap: 

• VRM uses threat intelligence to determine which vulnerabilities are actively being exploited. 

• VRM prioritizes vulnerabilities based on business impact, not just severity scores. 

• VRM reduces wasted effort on vulnerabilities that don’t pose an immediate risk. 

• VRM interoperates with your Active Directory services to automatically locate and include existing and new assets to ensure comprehensive risk exposures are visible, without manual intervention, this improving risk assessments and response, with reduced cost and increased ROI. 

• VRM interoperates with resources linked to your AWS Accounts to automatically identify current cloud Instances. Don’t be caught off guard as the benefits of cloud elasticity and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expose your organization to unknown risks.   

• VRM provides leading indicators of risk by foresting risk based on AI-generated Exploit prediction scores for discovered vulnerabilities.   

Changes happen at the speed of business. Accordingly, your risk solutions must be able to keep up with those changes, to provide timely, thorough, and accurate visibility of risks with business context. 

Security teams don’t need more data—they need better decisions. SAINT VRM helps organizations cut through the noise and focus on what truly reduces risk. 

Learn more about SAINT VRM. 

The Bottom Line 

Patching vulnerabilities shouldn’t be a numbers game. Consequently, Security leaders who continue treating vulnerability management as a volume-based exercise will fall behind—wasting resources on issues that don’t matter while real threats go unaddressed. 

The future of security is risk-based vulnerability management. Organizations that make the shift will not only reduce their attack surface more effectively but will also free up security teams to focus on real threats instead of endless backlogs. 

Still, if your security team is struggling to keep up with vulnerability scan results and needs a more strategic, risk-focused approach, let’s talk. 

Diane Reilly is the president of Carson & SAINT. She has over 30 years of experience delivering IT services to government and commercial clients. Connect with her on LinkedIn.