Monitoring Your IT Infrastructure with Vulnerability Severity Ratings
Monitoring your IT infrastructure with vulnerability severity ratings sounds complicated, but once you understand the process, it’s easy to implement into your business. By utilizing a rating system that helps determine where the gaps are in your infrastructure, you can find them, close them, and get on with business.
Your IT infrastructure is the hardware used to connect computers and users in your company. Cables, servers, routers, etc. are all part of the infrastructure. There’s often a large focus on securing the software end of a system, but overlooking the hardware infrastructure can leave your company at risk. Imagine what would happen if your network slowed to a crawl or crashed due to a spike in volume. Your company may not have access to vital systems and resources, and business could all but shut down. Not only is this bad for your reputation and customers, but it’s bad for your bottom line.
Benefits of Vulnerability Ratings
The first step in monitoring your IT infrastructure is to assess which pieces are the most vital to your operations. The vulnerability severity ratings can help you to determine which aspect of your hardware to address first. If you have a hardware failure that is affecting the performance of your firewall, is this more or less important than network issues causing data loss? How do you store your data, and are there ways to store it more securely and that allow for quicker access to it? What if some data is lost, how easily can it be recovered? All of these are questions that can be addressed with vulnerability severity ratings.
Another way that vulnerability severity ratings can help you monitor your IT infrastructure is through helping you find potential gaps that could cause cascading failures. The risk of one piece of your infrastructure failing may, in itself, not be critical, but if it causes a domino effect of network failures that crash your operations, your business will come to a halt along with your network. Using these ratings to determine which pieces of your infrastructure need additional space, or which ones have simply become obsolete, can help reduce the likelihood of a critical system failure due to a cascade.
Assessing and monitoring your IT infrastructure with vulnerability severity ratings is an important step toward ensuring that your network will run smoothly and securely. Finding gaps and closing them can reduce downtime, speed up your network, and keep your data safe all of which impact your bottom line. By knowing what pieces are the most vulnerable and how to address them, you are in a better position to keep your systems stable and get down to business.
Daniel Gottilla author
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