What is vulnerability management?

Vulnerability management is a holistic strategy for identifying and resolving security risks across an organization’s infrastructure. By integrating efforts like asset inventory, threat intelligence, and automated patching, it systematically reduces cyber risk and strengthens the overall security posture.

In this article, you'll learn what vulnerability management is and what it comprises, and explore the key steps for a robust vulnerability management strategy, from asset discovery and risk prioritization to remediation. We cover the main challenges like resource limits and software complexity, along with best practices such as automation. Finally, we’ll explore how Canonical's tools and expertise provide solutions for better visibility, compliance, and patching.

Vulnerability management: an overview

Vulnerabilities are an inescapable reality of software. Every year, more and more vulnerabilities are discovered and cataloged: between 2023 and 2024, the number of vulnerabilities recorded in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program rose by 24.1%

With AI-driven vulnerability research, that number is only expected to grow. Vulnerability management is how you manage the risks of this reality: it plays a central role in reducing cybersecurity risks by ensuring that software updates delivered through your patch management strategy are prioritized according to the impact they can have and the importance of the assets affected.

Read our introductory guide to vulnerability management ›

What does vulnerability management involve?

Vulnerability management usually encompasses numerous steps, including:

Discovery and inventory of IT assets

Discovering and inventorying all of your IT assets is the fundamental first step in defining your vulnerability management strategy. Discovery is the process of detecting every device, system, network, hardware component, and software application in your environment, so that there are no unknowns. Once you've discovered your IT assets, you catalog them. This is your Inventory. Together, they form the mandatory first step in securing your network.

Discovery and inventory includes two vital actions:

Risk management and triage of vulnerabilities

A good vulnerability management plan must help you categorize vulnerabilities and outline how you’ll patch them or mitigate them. Adopting a framework and having a process for vulnerability triage enables you to balance your available resources with your risk appetite, and address risks on a timely basis that fits your operations and system needs.

The current industry standard for risk assessment is the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which categorizes vulnerabilities by their seriousness and characteristics.

Discovery and detection of vulnerabilities and CVEs

Having a vulnerability management plan requires knowing what existing or newly discovered vulnerabilities will affect your assets. As such, your plan will require tools and processes that continuously assess systems for CVEs, outdated packages, misconfigurations or other risks.

You will also need to actively monitor new vulnerabilities that may affect your inventory of IT assets. It is industry best practice to subscribe to and track exploit databases, security notices, threat advisories, and other vulnerability tracking knowledge repositories, so that you can mitigate the risks of cyber incidents.

Prioritization and remediation of vulnerabilities

Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. It is highly infeasible to patch all CVEs of all severity levels all the time, as this would require great amounts of time, effort, and testing. What’s more, two different tech stacks might have completely different levels of exposure or risk to the exact same high-severity CVE.

Knowing how to prioritize threats and risk probabilities within your available resources is a fundamental part of vulnerability management.

Public tracking databases, like CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, are essential for keeping pace with global threat activity.

However, these databases should be evaluated against your specific environment.

When vulnerabilities are discovered in the software, hardware or systems you use, patches are typically issued by the vendors or companies who make and maintain that product. Addressing these vulnerabilities can be done via two methods – remediation or mitigation:

Learn how the Ubuntu Security Team prioritizes vulnerabilities in the KEV ›

Assessment and continuous improvement

A vulnerability management strategy isn’t static: it’s also about continuous improvement. An effective vulnerability management strategy incorporates learning from organizational experiences and incorporates those lessons back into its processes and activities, in order to adapt to the changing threat landscape over time.

You should take steps to ensure that your vulnerability management strategy undergoes regular assessment and evaluation, to gauge how well it is working and to incorporate successes, failures and lessons learned into its core design.

Biggest challenges for vulnerability management

The biggest challenges and considerations in vulnerability management include:

Resource limitations

Hiring specialized security staff is both expensive and time-consuming, with global demand far outstripping the available talent pool. For many organizations, the constant cycle of manual patching drains full-time engineers away from revenue-generating activities and toward basic maintenance. This creates a significant scaling bottleneck.

Read a case study to see how Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro helps >

Software stack complexity

It is not enough to secure parts of your software one by one. As different tools and apps connect to each other, the number of "doors" an attacker can use grows much larger. Vulnerability management is holistic: you have to protect the entire system and the connections between your tools, not just the individual pieces of code.

Dependencies and nested dependencies

Modern software is built on a complex web of direct and indirect dependencies that are often buried deep within code. Developers are frequently unaware these hidden components exist, leaving them outdated and unpatched. Research shows this is a massive blind spot, with 91% of analyzed codebases containing outdated versions of open source components and nearly half harboring high-risk vulnerabilities. Every unknown dependency expands your attack surface by providing a secret doorway for hackers.

Dependencies must be inventoried, maintained and monitored, as they are often the target for software supply chain attacks, such as hallucination attacks or namespace attacks. Large enterprises using complex, multi-layered, and highly sophisticated tech stacks are especially at risk of dependency-based vulnerabilities.

Vulnerabilities come from a wide variety of sources

Focusing solely on CVEs and patching is a common mistake that leaves systems exposed. In reality, software failures often stem from issues beyond code bugs, such as insecure configurations, poor deployment habits, and simple human error.

To be effective, vulnerability management must look at the entire "failure chain." This means automating repetitive, manual tasks to prevent mistakes, ensuring all teams are aligned on security policies, with compliance rules integrated directly into the workflow. By connecting your patch, configuration, and assessment policies into one consistent strategy, you can respond to risks faster and more accurately.

Best practices for vulnerability management

Building an effective vulnerability management plan requires moving away from reactive patching and toward a proactive, systemic approach. To secure modern infrastructure at scale, organizations should adopt the following foundational best practices:

Reduce human error through automation

Human error is the primary driver of security incidents, contributing to 74% of all data breaches through configuration mistakes, credential misuse, or social engineering. Automation is the most effective way to mitigate these risks because it eliminates manual intervention in tedious, repetitive tasks. By automating configuration scaling, patching, and hardening, organizations ensure that security standards remain consistent, predictable, and error-free across the entire infrastructure.

Enforce environment consistency through secure configuration

Hardening a system involves a delicate balance between performance and security. Industry standards like CIS Benchmarks and DISA-STIG offer hundreds of settings to lock down environments, but applying these manually is slow and error-prone.

To run high-security workloads effectively, organizations must minimize unique, "snowflake" environments. Instead, aim for a highly consistent, secure environment by using automation tools like the Ubuntu Security Guide. These tools allow you to automatically apply complex hardening profiles and easily recreate a known, securely designed environment from scratch. Furthermore, this consistency allows organizations to deploy critical updates—such as kernel patches or component upgrades—universally across the entire infrastructure, rather than tedious, stack-by-stack maintenance.

Scale management with asset visibility and observability

You cannot secure what you cannot see. Comprehensive asset visibility and continuous monitoring are critical to scale your vulnerability management efforts. Organizations need real-time observability to track software versions, patch statuses, and configuration drifts across the entire enterprise. Centralizing this data through a dedicated management platform, such as using Landscape for Ubuntu estates, provides the operational oversight necessary to identify vulnerabilities and deploy fixes seamlessly across thousands of machines.

Rely on trusted software sources

Organizations must have confidence that the software they deploy is stable, actively maintained, and patched against vulnerabilities in a timely manner. To mitigate supply chain risks, simplify and centralize your ecosystem by consuming software exclusively from providers with a long track record of maintenance and proven support for a wide ecosystem. Ensuring that all components of your stack – including containers, virtualization, Kubernetes, and the underlying OS – are covered by a trusted provider guarantees enterprise-grade security from a single, reliable source.

Implement independent verification

Even when working with world-class vendors, a robust security posture relies on a "trust but verify" mindset. Organizations should implement independent vulnerability scanning systems to provide an objective, secondary check on their software stack.

How does Canonical help with vulnerability management?

Canonical helps organizations simplify vulnerability management with timely security patches across thousands of open source packages.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription provides security maintenance for Ubuntu and Canonical’s complete open source portfolio, as well as a set of tools that deliver automated patches, hardening, compliance streamlining, and estate management.

Vulnerability visibility

Known vulnerabilities that affect Ubuntu packages are tracked in the public Ubuntu CVE Tracker. Canonical’s security engineers triage, prioritize, and fix threats specifically for Ubuntu deployments. These fixes are delivered through a unified, high-integrity channel and can be applied automatically via unattended upgrades. High and critical Kernel security patches can be delivered via the Livepatch Service, without the need for system downtime.

Long-term stability

Most open source software suppliers only address vulnerabilities in the latest version of their software. However, updating to a cutting-edge release carries a risk of introducing incompatible changes and heightens the risk of regressions. To avoid this, Ubuntu users receive tested security updates that address security flaws while prioritizing compatibility, by targeting the software version originally distributed in the Ubuntu release they have installed.

Ubuntu Pro brings up to 15 years of stability, security maintenance, and support to your systems, with backported fixes that ensure your established IT systems remain maintained and operational.

Learn why organizations get Ubuntu Pro ›

Fleet-wide automation for hardening and compliance

Canonical provides tools to scale security patching across thousands of machines. Landscape, Canonical’s systems management tool, enables teams to monitor vulnerabilities and automate patching across their fleet. For regulated industries, the Ubuntu Security Guide (USG) automates system hardening to meet standards like CIS or DISA-STIG. This turns a tedious, manual audit process into a single CLI command, ensuring that your systems are configured to prevent attacks.

On top of this, Ubuntu Pro simplifies your security compliance burden for frameworks such as NIST, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, and ISO27001.

Read about our compliance and hardening automations ›

Industry partnerships for better software and security

Canonical works with leading providers of security scanning software to help users identify vulnerabilities in their Ubuntu environment and reduce the likelihood of false positives. Canonical distributes vulnerability information through open standard formats (OVAL, OSV, and VEX) that can be integrated with any third-party tool that supports these schemas.

Canonical launched the Ubuntu Security Research Alliance Program in order to improve the transparency, standardization, and accuracy of vulnerability data generated by third-party scanning software. By working alongside security vendors like Blackduck, Tenable, Netrise, Aikido, Canonical reduces false positives and other inaccurate scan results that either increase costs or unnecessarily prolong exposure.

Read about the Ubuntu Security Research Alliance Program ›