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This article was first published in CPO Magazine in October 2023

The Vulnerability Firehose

IT and security teams face an overwhelming challenge in managing vulnerability disclosures. With 25,000 vulnerabilities disclosed in 2022 alone and 7,500 more in just the first four months of 2023, the volume of potential threats has reached unprecedented levels. This explosion has only intensified since the pandemic fundamentally altered enterprise attack surfaces.

The scale of this challenge has exposed the inadequacy of existing vulnerability and patch management solutions. Traditional approaches simply cannot deliver meaningful impact against modern threat volumes and velocity.

Meanwhile, ransomware attacks continue surging. March 2023 saw a 91% increase in attacks compared to February, and a 62% year-over-year increase. While security professionals universally agree that timely patching represents one of the most effective defenses against ransomware and other cyberattacks, the average time to patch remains a staggering 215 days.

This disconnect between known solutions and actual implementation reveals the depth of the operational challenges facing IT teams.

The Limits of Risk-Based Approaches

Current vulnerability management strategies focus heavily on risk prioritization—helping organizations identify which vulnerabilities demand immediate attention. While valuable, this approach addresses only half the problem. Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) excels at the "what" but largely ignores the "how" of remediation.

The actual orchestration of vulnerability remediation typically involves disparate tools, processes, and teams with minimal coordination between them. This fragmentation creates gaps where critical vulnerabilities fall through organizational cracks, leading to the extended remediation timelines that leave organizations exposed.

Furthermore, demonstrating the effectiveness and progress of vulnerability management programs becomes a massive undertaking when each vulnerability requires one-off discovery, correlation, and remediation efforts. The lack of integrated workflows compounds inter-team frustration while obscuring measures of success.

Whether organizations want to acknowledge it or not, RBVM strategies alone are insufficient for modern threat environments. Everyone suffers from this limitation.

The IT Perspective: Inventory and Discovery Challenges

"I have complete insight into all our devices and the software they're running," said no IT engineer, ever. Comprehensive asset inventory represents a critical foundation for accurate risk assessment, yet it remains elusive for most organizations.

Creating and maintaining such inventories requires multiple complex systems that compete for limited IT resources. Asset discovery often becomes a lower priority compared to immediate operational demands, leaving organizations with incomplete visibility into their actual attack surfaces.

IT and security teams waste countless hours deploying active and passive scanning tools to fill inventory gaps, lacking simple, turnkey solutions they can rely on. Even when initial discovery efforts succeed, teams must constantly worry about new devices appearing online and software changes on existing systems, forcing reactive responses to disruptive surprises rather than proactive management.

The Security Team Dilemma: Responsibility Without Authority

Security teams bear responsibility for vulnerability remediation but often lack direct access to the systems and processes needed to implement fixes. CISOs and their engineers want streamlined vulnerability management that spans from disclosure to remediation with minimal burden on IT counterparts.

Instead, security teams find themselves relegated to making requests that generate frustration rather than results. While they identify critical vulnerabilities requiring immediate attention, IT teams juggle competing priorities including password resets, printer issues, and hardware problems that demand "immediate attention."

This dynamic creates tension where security teams understand the urgency of unpatched vulnerabilities while IT teams view security requests as additional burden on already strained resources. The result is extended vulnerability exposure that serves neither team's objectives.

The IT Operations Trap: Speed vs. Safety

IT engineers face an impossible choice: patch quickly and risk blame for disruptions, or patch slowly and risk blame for security incidents. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario drives conservative patching approaches that introduce arbitrary "burn-in" periods between rollout phases.

These delays aim to reduce the likelihood of troubleshooting failed patches at 3 AM and facing criticism the following day. IT teams want repeatable, flexible patch orchestration that enables rapid deployment while ensuring safety—but existing tools force them to choose between speed and stability.

The result is systematic under-patching that leaves organizations vulnerable while IT teams attempt to balance competing pressures from security, operations, and business stakeholders.

The Perception vs. Reality Gap

At the core of all this organizational chaos lies one fundamental truth: teams responsible for patching hesitate to act aggressively because they fear patches will cause operational disruptions. If someone could guarantee that patches would never cause problems, unpatched vulnerabilities would become as obsolete as floppy disks.

Here's the striking reality: less than 2% of patches actually require rollback due to operational issues. Patch-induced disruptions have become far less common than they were years ago, yet perception continues driving behavior in ways that data doesn't support.

This perception paradox makes sense from a human perspective. While only 2% of patches may fail, identifying which 2% will cause problems has historically been something vulnerability management technology has ignored entirely. The emotional and professional impact of operational disruptions hasn't lessened over time—if anything, business dependence on IT systems has made disruptions more visible and costly.

The Innovation Imperative

It's time for vulnerability management technology to evolve beyond identification and reporting toward actually helping IT teams implement fixes efficiently and confidently. The industry has invested heavily in sophisticated scanning, prioritization, and risk assessment capabilities while largely ignoring the operational challenges that prevent timely remediation.

Innovation must address the fundamental question that drives hesitant patching behavior: "Will this patch cause problems in my environment?" Until technology can answer this question with confidence, IT teams will continue choosing operational safety over security urgency.

The IT Agent Solution

At IT Agent, we recognize that effective vulnerability management requires addressing both risk assessment and remediation confidence. Our platform provides real-world intelligence about patch behavior across diverse environments, enabling IT teams to patch aggressively when data supports immediate deployment while taking additional precautions only when evidence suggests potential issues.

This approach transforms vulnerability management from a risk assessment exercise into a confident action platform. When teams understand how patches have performed across thousands of similar deployments, they can make informed decisions rather than defaulting to conservative delays.

Breaking the Cycle

The never-ending battle between security urgency and operational stability will continue until technology addresses the root cause of patching hesitancy. Organizations need solutions that provide confidence rather than just information, enabling teams to act on vulnerability intelligence rather than simply collecting it.

This transformation requires more than better scanning or smarter prioritization—it demands fundamental changes in how vulnerability management technology approaches the human and operational factors that drive actual remediation behavior.

The Path Forward

Resolving the patching vs. stability conflict requires acknowledging that both perspectives reflect legitimate organizational needs. Security teams rightfully focus on threat mitigation, while IT teams appropriately prioritize operational reliability. The answer isn't choosing sides but rather providing technology that enables both objectives simultaneously.

When IT teams can patch with confidence based on real-world intelligence rather than fear based on perception, the entire dynamic shifts. Security improves while operational risk decreases, creating the win-win outcome that has eluded organizations for decades.

Building Collaborative Success

The future of vulnerability management lies in solutions that unite security and IT teams around shared objectives rather than creating competing priorities. This requires technology that understands operational realities while addressing security urgencies.

Organizations that embrace intelligence-driven approaches to patch deployment will find themselves better positioned to manage both security risks and operational requirements effectively. The battle between patching and stability doesn't have to be never-ending—it just requires better tools and shared intelligence to resolve.

The question facing the industry isn't whether to prioritize security or operations, but rather how quickly we can develop technology that makes this choice unnecessary by enabling confident, rapid remediation that serves both objectives simultaneously.

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