Addressing vulnerability remediation

According to Forrester’s 2018 security survey published in 2018, 58% of enterprise organizations suffered a breach at least once in the previous year, and over 41% of those external breaches exploited some software vulnerability. The problem is that the vulnerability management workflow⁠—from vulnerability reports run by security teams to vulnerability remediation done by IT operators —is fragmented and manual, making vulnerability remediation slow and leaving IT infrastructure exposed to external attacks for too long. A 2018 report by the Ponemon Institute found organizations spend around 320 hours a week on vulnerability responses.

“The vulnerability management process most organizations use today is not sustainable for reducing the security risk of external attacks. There is a major gap between sophisticated scanning tools that identify vulnerabilities and the fragmented and manual, error-prone approach of fixing these vulnerabilities,” said Matt Waxman, Head of Product at Puppet. “Puppet Remediate closes this gap giving IT the insight they need to end the current soul-crushing work associated with vulnerability remediation to ensure they are keeping their organization safe.”

Puppet Remediate dramatically reduces the time from vulnerability detection to remediation across a company’s infrastructure through key integrations with security partners to unify infrastructure and vulnerability data, quick identification of what infrastructure resources are impacted by vulnerabilities, and the ability to take immediate action to remediate vulnerable packages without requiring any agent technology on the vulnerable systems on both Linux and Windows through SSH and WinRM.

Key features of Puppet’s latest product include:

Shared vulnerability data between Security and IT Ops. Puppet Remediate unifies infrastructure data with vulnerability data from Tenable, Qualys and Rapid7 to prioritize vulnerabilities. This also allows IT Ops to get access to vulnerability data in real-time, reducing delays and eliminating risks related to manual handover of data.

Risk-based prioritization. IT can prioritize the most mission-critical systems and identify vulnerabilities within the organization's systems to separate signal from noise based on infrastructure context. With a dashboard that lists the most critical vulnerabilities, IT Ops can quickly learn what assets have vulnerabilities at a glance and determine what to fix first.

Agentless remediation. In 2018, 8 out of the Top 10 CVEs reported could be remediated with a package update. Puppet Remediate includes four pre-built tasks, including the ability to update packages. IT Ops can take immediate action to remediate a vulnerability without leaving the application or having to use a CLI or write scripts—and, without requiring any agent technology on the vulnerable systems. Remediate can also load modules from the Puppet Forge where a vast community of IT operators, security analysts, developers, and partners share ready-to-automate solutions as Bolt Tasks.

Channel Partners Provide an Established Infrastructure and InfoSec Practice

Initial channel partners were selected based on their established infrastructure and InfoSec practices and ability to bridge the gap that exists between security and IT practices in enterprises. The channel partners already sell into the vulnerability assessment market with products from Qualys, Rapid7 and Tenable. A 2018 report from IDC valued the vulnerability assessment market at $1.7 billion.

"Puppet Remediate offers real added value with its new functions to our customers,” said Sebastian Scheuring, CEO Bitbone AG. “It drastically automates the workflow of vulnerability remediation through taking out the manual, mundane and error-prone steps that are required to remediate vulnerabilities. Continuous scans, remediation tasks and short cycles of update processes significantly increase the security level of IT environments."