Rethinking Vulnerability Management at Scale

Vulnerability management is often viewed as a checkbox activity—scan, report, remediate, repeat. However as organizations scale and their digital footprints expand across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, the volume of vulnerabilities can become overwhelming. Helping customers shift away from traditional, reactive vulnerability management, Next Phase successfully implements scalable, context-aware vulnerability management programs. 

To address this, we shifted our vulnerability management mindset from reactive to risk-driven. This blog outlines our implementation of a scalable, context-aware vulnerability management program, with Tenable as a core enabling platform.

Our Approach: Context Over Count

We began by redefining what constitutes a valuable insight within vulnerability data.

Our approach focused on three key principles:

1. Context-aware risk scoring: Not all vulnerabilities are created equal.
2. Operational visibility: Vulnerabilities must be traceable to asset owners and business services.
3. Automation-first remediation: Time-to-remediate must be minimized with as little manual intervention as possible.

To support this vision, we needed a platform that went beyond simply detecting vulnerabilities. This is where Tenable played a critical role.

Tenable at Work

Tenable became our primary scanner, but more importantly, it served as a data source in a broader vulnerability management ecosystem.

Here’s how we integrated it into our workflow:

• Asset inventory syncing: We synchronized Tenable with our configuration management database (CMDB) to enrich vulnerability data with asset ownership, geographic location, environment (e.g., production or development), and business criticality.
• Custom risk scoring: While Tenable’s Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) is powerful, we augmented it with our own scoring model that includes factors such as exploitability, asset exposure, and potential business impact.
• Automation pipelines: High-risk vulnerabilities triggered automatic ticket creation in our IT Service Management (ITSM) system. Each ticket was tagged with clear ownership and service-level agreements (SLAs) according to internal policies.
• Dashboards for accountability: Using Tenable’s API, we built near real-time dashboards to visualize metrics like open vulnerabilities per business unit, time-to-remediate metrics, and trending threats.

Driving a Culture Shift: From Finger-Pointing to Ownership

One of the most impactful changes was cultural rather than technical. By associating vulnerabilities with asset ownership and business impact, we shifted remediation from a loosely assigned task into a clear organizational responsibility. Our dashboards didn’t just display raw data, they told stories, and people paid attention.

We launched monthly gamified patching sprints, recognizing teams with the lowest mean time to remediate (MTTR). This added an element of fun and motivation to an otherwise mundane activity.

Lessons Learned

Through this journey, we had several takeaways:

1. Start with the asset: Without understanding your inventory, protection is impossible
2. Don’t just rely on CVS: Context is king.
3. Automate with purpose: Focus on human effort where it’s most impactful.
4. Tools are not solutions: While technology is a good facilitator, the real transformation comes from refining processes and openness to an evolving organizational culture.

What’s Next?

Looking ahead, we are piloting integrations with our cloud posture management tools to further unify our visibility across IaaS environments. We are also exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited within our environment.

Vulnerability management today is not just about reducing risk; it is about building resilience. And that resilience starts with context, ownership, and the right balance of automation and awareness.