From time to time we ask our analyst friends at Freeform Dynamics to compose a primer on a tech topic du jour. Today, we focus on vulnerability management, a crucial component in every IT security strategy.

Vulnerability management is largely about ‘divide and conquer’ - identifying the critical systems that should be treated, assessing them, prioritising the results and dealing with them in some way, according to Freeform analyst Jon Collins, who wrote this paper.

But vulnerability management is easier preached than practiced. For a start – and this is not an easy start – you need to know what you have in your environment. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to assess the risk.

The author seeks to answer the following questions about vulnerability management:

• What is it?
• Why should you be thinking about it?
• What can you do about it?
• What else should you consider?

The Register Guide to securing your network is five pages long and a straightforward read. ®