Reduce time taken to fix security vulnerabilities by 50% with vulnerability analysis best practices

Cyber-attacks are increasing every day and are now the third-highest global risk, according to the World Economic Forum. GSMA’s mobile telecommunications security threat landscape report of 2019 says, “there was a 55% increase in breaches caused by open-source software vulnerabilities”.

Addressing security vulnerabilities is a top priority for service providers in the connectedness industry because a cyber-attack could disrupt services for millions of customers, impact customer’s trust, and deteriorate service provider’s brand & reputation. To achieve the required security objectives, service providers must adopt a structured approach to vulnerability management. Vulnerability management, which is the process of finding, assessing, remediating, and mitigating security weaknesses for known assets, gives service providers the ability to assess the status and risk of unknown hardware/software.

Depending on the service provider’s infrastructure size and state of the configuration management database (CMDB), finding the responsible asset owner can be a highly challenging and cumbersome task, resulting in lead times of up to many weeks. Therefore, vulnerability management must include automation to discover new vulnerabilities, perform risk assessment, and assign it to the right team for a quick resolution.

Leverage a unified ticketing system to enhance the ITSM consolidation program

Every service provider’s application landscape consists of multiple systems performing diverse functions. Managing standalone systems which are not interconnected involves enormous effort and cost. Also, service providers today are increasing acquisitions every year. In this post-merger environment, end-users struggle with distributed IT Service Management (ITSM) environment and unfamiliar technologies, which leads to a spike in demand for support. Some of the critical challenges faced in distributed ITSM environment are

• Multiple processes for the same service management function
• Complex third-party integrations
• Lack of unified, integrated dashboard view from different systems

To overcome these challenges, process consolidation has become imperative. Businesses looking at ways to cut costs and enhance competitiveness are embracing various strategies to consolidate ITSM systems. This insight details the unified ticketing system and critical considerations for businesses to advance their ITSM consolidation program.

Fig. Key considerations to advance the ITSM consolidation strategy

Consolidate fragmented inventories into a single source of truth, and optimize processes such as network planning and design, and service assurance

Network inventory is made up of assets (Physical, Virtual, and Logical elements), and locating the correct asset in the right place as quickly as possible is essential for delivering services to customers on time. In recent times, mergers and acquisitions have fuelled the growth of service providers in the connectedness industry. As a result, most organizations have multiple disjointed inventory systems, often performing similar tasks, with critical data scattered across different systems. This results in duplicate information, complicated data retrieval and analysis, and ultimately impairs inventory visibility.

Service providers are trying to build a unified inventory system to have an in-depth network view. Still, the complexity involved in developing and implementing such a consolidation strategy discourages service providers from attempting.

In this insight, Prodapt presents a unique network inventory consolidation strategy with critical levers to help service providers achieve a unified inventory ecosystem. The levers help to cleanse the data and study its relationship recursively. This reduces the analysis and development time during network consolidation. Service providers can analyze tons of data from various sources, formulate, and have a complete view of their network inventory.