With the complexity of today’s network infrastructure, it’s common to have forgotten assets still accessible on the network. It’s important to gain visibility into what kinds of devices and assets you have, and what their vulnerability status is. Over 70% of the highly publicized breaches this year were caused by failures in vulnerability management programs. Attacks resulting in data loss are usually performed by exploiting known and documented security vulnerabilities in software, network infrastructure, servers, workstations, etc.

Discovering where you’re most vulnerable is a security priority and likely already part of your overall program. The ability to continuously identify threats and monitor unexpected changes in your network before they turn into breaches is common practice. Compliance drivers also necessitate vulnerability scanning on a regular basis. For these reasons, you should invest in a vulnerability scanning solution that gives you immediate, global visibility into your assets and vulnerabilities. However, deploying the scanner rather than being physical or virtualized may be a challenge in and of itself. Scheduling scans properly based on a set of proven processes requires a depth of expertise and experience you may not have available.