Vulnerability Management
Constantly assessing the security of your own systems is an important task in maintaining a secure network. I relate regular security assessments to personal hygiene, such as brushing your teeth everyday (and even more "in-depth" maintenance such as flossing and using mouthwash). All of these actions are an effort to prevent "bad things" from happening. Often, the "bad thing" hasn't happened yet, and you are trying to get ahead of the curve to protect yourself from cavities, gum disease, or worst-case, all of your teeth falling out. Vulnerability management plays the same role in your organization. By regularly assessing your systems, finding problems, and fixing them, you hope to get ahead of the curve and prevent bad things from happening, such as data leakage, breaches, and compromises of your systems by “evil bad guys”.
All of us can hear our parents voices in our heads, as when we were growing up we were all told to "brush your teeth before you go to bed".
As I stated above, finding the vulnerabilities is just the first step. You must have a process in place to fix the vulnerabilities that you've identified. After that, your processes need to check to be certain that a vulnerability was remediated. Your plan for network health has to track vulnerability remediation, and empower those responsible to be in the loop and fix the problems before something "bad" happens (if it were only so easy as brushing, flossing, and using mouthwash). Tenable has a suite of tools to help you both find as many vulnerabilities as possible and implement a process for continued remediation. Below are some examples: