Open-AudIT 6 Insight
The prioritisation paradox: why severity scores aren’t enough.
Vulnerability scanners don’t fail because they find too little—they fail because they find too much. Thousands of CVEs ranked by a static score doesn’t tell you what’s truly risky in your environment. Open-AudIT 6 helps you move from “patch everything” to contextual vulnerability management: prioritise what matters, reduce noise, and prove ROI with less manual work.
Most teams have lived the same cycle: run a scan, export a massive list, and spend days in spreadsheets and meetings trying to figure out what’s actually on critical systems. That manual cross-referencing is slow, error-prone, and it steals time from the only thing that reduces risk—remediation.
Contextual Vulnerability Management (CVM) fixes this by connecting CVEs to the reality of your network: the assets you own, where they sit, and what they support. Instead of treating every alert as an emergency, you focus on the vulnerabilities that are both relevant and impactful.
What “context” actually means
Severity is a useful input—but it’s not a prioritisation strategy. CVM combines multiple signals to reflect real business risk:
- Asset criticality. Is the vulnerable device a test box, or a production system supporting core applications or sensitive data?
- Environmental exposure. Is it internet-facing, sitting in a DMZ, or protected behind multiple security layers?
- Exploitability signals. Is there a public exploit, or evidence of active exploitation in the wild?
A simple example
Instead of asking “What are our highest CVSS issues?”, CVM helps you ask:
“Show me all devices with Vulnerability X that are part of the production database group and located in the internet-exposed DMZ.”
That’s the difference between an alert list and a remediation plan.
How Open-AudIT 6 makes CVM practical
Open-AudIT is your source of truth for what’s on the network: device inventory, software, configuration, and change history—stored in a central database. The Vulnerabilities capability uses that inventory to evaluate exposure to known CVEs, then lets you filter and report based on the context that matters.
- Keep your asset inventory current with discovery and audits (manual or scheduled).
- Select the vendors you care about so you only process relevant vulnerability checks.
- Retrieve new vulnerability records regularly and evaluate them against your audited inventory.
- Store results so dashboards and reports are fast, consistent, and audit-friendly.
- Refresh daily to track progress and confirm remediation outcomes over time.
“When you prioritise purely by severity, you patch low-risk assets while critical systems stay exposed. Context is what turns vulnerability data into business risk reduction.”
The ROI: fewer spreadsheets, faster fixes
CVM isn’t just “better security theory”—it directly reduces cost and improves outcomes:
1) Save engineer time
Reduce days of manual triage (exports, spreadsheets, meetings) by surfacing the small subset of vulnerabilities that represent the majority of real risk.
2) Enable continuous improvement
When prioritisation drops from days to minutes, you can scan and review more often—catching newly vulnerable or misconfigured assets earlier and proving remediation progress over time.
Why this matters
High-profile breaches have shown that missing a known vulnerability on a critical system can have severe financial and reputational consequences. CVM is designed to stop that “we had the data, but didn’t act on the right thing” failure mode.
Learn more
For deeper technical details (vendor selection, evaluation logic, and reporting scope), see the official Vulnerabilities documentation.
Ready to reduce noise and patch what matters?
Download the latest version of Open-AudIT here.