The Vulnerability Management Lifecycle

Vulnerability management (VM) is not a one-time scan; it is a continuous program. Treating it as a lifecycle ensures weaknesses are reliably found, judged, fixed, and confirmed closed, rather than piling up in an ignored report.

The classic loop is: discover, assess, prioritize, remediate, verify, then repeat. Each phase has owners, inputs, and outputs.

You cannot protect what you cannot see. Discovery builds and maintains an accurate asset inventory and finds weaknesses across it:

• Hosts, cloud instances, containers, services, and software versions.
• Authenticated and unauthenticated scans.
• Passive discovery and external attack surface mapping.

An incomplete inventory is the most common reason VM programs fail.