“Where the heck do I start?” Or: Why we created Remediation Planner

When everything is critical, nothing is critical

Every security tool in the security operations toolbox generates alerts. New exposures. New vulnerabilities. New viruses and malware. New devices accessing our network. They all generate an alert. And when it’s your job to sift through the alerts to triage, validate, and action them, it’s incredibly hard to prioritize each against the mountain of other things that could and should be fixed.

It’s an issue every security operations practitioner and their boss deals with on a daily basis: We have all of these issues. We have all of these alerts. We have all of this work. So where do we start?

In a world where every alert, every asset, every issue is not equal, you need to begin prioritizing by thinking about two things: impact and effort. What do I tackle first?

So we built the Remediation Planner to help your teams make the biggest impact in eliminating security gaps with the most focused and efficient effort possible.

Improvement is in the eye of the beholder (and it’s beautiful)

Everyone wants to get better and improve. For enterprises, this simply means being more secure than yesterday. And that could be by having fewer vulnerabilities in your attack surface. Or it could be by patching 1,000 machines.

We built the CyCognito platform to go beyond discovering issues (and with its high fidelity–you don’t need to worry nearly as much about false positives as you do with, say, an IDS system), and to take everything about that issue into context to better prioritize its resolution AND the resolution of multiple issues.

To make things easy on security operations teams when it comes to remediation, our approach is to give you:

• Expert guidance with detailed, actionable remediation guidance, evidence of uncovered issues, and links to other resources.
• Prioritization based on attacker priorities and business importance of the asset, not a one-size-fits-all CVSS rating.
• The opportunity and metrics needed to improve your average remediation time (MTTR).
• A focused, customized-for-your-organization remediation plan that instantly shows you what you need to do to raise your current security grade to your desired security grade: what assets and issues need to be addressed and how long it will take based on your current average remediation time. 

A deceptively simple idea, built on complex analytics

The Remediation Planner makes it very quick and easy for security teams to define the scope of their remediation plan and then understand exactly what needs to be done to achieve the plan. On the back end, of course, there is a lot of sophistication that makes the plan turnkey for you. These analytics include:

• Security grading for every asset
• Automatic attribution for every asset (for every organization, environment, platform)
• Issue identification for every asset
• Issue prioritization based on the organization as well as attacker priorities
• Remediation metrics, such as average time-to-remediate and issue aging

Tell us what you want, we handle the rest