Vulnerability remediation and effective patch management are key to ensuring the IT environment is secure and protected against cyberattacks. Research has shown that unpatched well-known vulnerabilities and delays in remediation increase cybersecurity risks, fostering data breaches and ransomware attacks.

Patch automation is crucial in today’s fast-paced and highly complex IT hybrid environment. As the number and complexity of software applications continue to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for IT teams to keep up with the volume of patches and updates that need to be applied. This challenge is particularly critical for financial institutions facing cyber threats due to the sensitive financial and personal information they hold.

Furthermore, automated patching processes play a vital role in mitigating these risks, ensuring that all systems are consistently updated with the latest security patches per regulatory compliances. This automation streamlines and automates the patching process, significantly increasing efficiency.

The regulatory body recommendations require banks and other financial institutions to have a robust patch management policy in place to ensure patch compliance. The guidelines specify that financial institutions must:

1. Establish a formal process for patch management (pre-patch and post-patch), including the identification, testing, and deployment of patches.
2. Ensure that all operating systems, databases, middleware, and 3rd party applications are regularly updated with the latest security patches.
3. Conduct regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities that require patches. Automatically correlate the most appropriate remediation action based on prioritised vulnerabilities.
4. Ensure that patches are deployed promptly, particularly for critical and high-risk vulnerabilities.
5. Establish a process for tracking and reporting patch compliance to senior management and the board of directors.

Failure to comply with the Regulatory body guidelines on patch compliance can result in regulatory sanctions, fines, reputational damage, and exposure to cyberattacks and data breaches.

Prioritisation: Key to Remediation

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats, organisations face the formidable challenge of identifying, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities in their systems, making it imperative to establish an effective prioritisation framework. However, the current vulnerability prioritisation process within our organisation lacks a systematic approach, resulting in suboptimal allocation of resources and exposure to high-impact security risks.

As a result, this leaves financial institutions with considerable impacts, including:

1. Lack of Comprehensive Criteria: The absence of clear criteria for prioritisation leads to a reactive response to threats, hampering proactive measures.
2. Resource Constraints: Limited resources are not efficiently allocated due to the current approach’s failure to consider criticality and potential impact.
3. Inadequate Integration of Threat Intelligence: The process lacks real-time threat intelligence, leaving the organisation vulnerable to actively exploited vulnerabilities.
4. Static Assessment Methods: Relying on static assessments contributes to a stagnant prioritisation model, necessitating dynamic and adaptive methods.
5. Absence of Business Impact Consideration: The process overlooks the potential business impact, increasing exposure to risks with significant consequences.
6. Limited Collaboration Across Departments: Siloed communication hampers a holistic understanding, hindering alignment with overall business objectives.
7. Vulnerability Prioritisation Framework to Mitigate Challenges

To address these challenges, there is a need to implement a robust and adaptive vulnerability prioritisation framework, which should encompass comprehensive criteria, consider resource constraints, integrate real-time threat intelligence, employ dynamic assessment methods, factor in business impact, and encourage collaboration across departments. The goal is to establish a proactive and risk-aware approach to vulnerability management that minimises exposure to potential security threats.

AI to Enhance Helpdesk and Improve Productivity

Organisations face significant challenges in their daily IT operations amid the surge in digital business transformation. This transformation leads to the proliferation of new applications, services, and tools intensifying the complexity of digital assets. In the current landscape of helpdesk operations, several challenges compromise overall productivity.

From an IT operation perspective, service desks bear a substantial burden in addressing a rising number of queries, requests, incidents, service tasks, and change request tasks. In cases where automation exists, it might be confined to silos, lacking reusability and standardisation across teams. Additionally, the absence of robust knowledge management results in the loss of valuable tacit knowledge, exacerbated by high employee attrition rates. This reliance on human expertise introduces inconsistencies and variabilities in operational quality due to potential human errors.

Moreover, the helpdesk ecosystem lacks advanced AI solutions, contributing to prolonged response times, overwhelming agents with repetitive tasks, and an overall suboptimal customer experience.

How Will This Session Help?

Organisations find it difficult to remediate vulnerabilities with speed. The gap in objectives, tools, and processes of security and IT operations results in critical vulnerabilities not being addressed quickly enough to protect the enterprise.

HCL BigFix is extending its remediating capabilities, allowing users to proactively secure the enterprise faster than ever. BigFix CyberFOCUS Security Analytics is a set of security capabilities designed to help IT Operations collaborate with Security Operations to PRESCRIBE the most effective remediation strategies, PROTECT against exploits, and PROVIDE better cybersecurity.

OpenGov Asia is pleased to invite you to an exclusive OpenGov Breakfast Insight which will take a deep dive into cutting-edge security capabilities and the most recent IT automation powered by AI to enhance customer experience.