Custom Vulnerability Management: A Smarter Cybersecurity Approach

In today’s fast-evolving cybersecurity landscape, businesses rely on Vulnerability Management Systems (VMS) to identify, assess, and mitigate risks. However, commercial VMS solutions come with inherent problems that limit their efficiency and adaptability. Organizations seeking greater flexibility and control are now exploring custom-built alternatives tailored to their specific needs.

Before we dive into why organizations today need a custom VMS platform, lets understand the pain points of the security teams today and how security platforms have played a critical role in better cybersecurity management.

The Case for Unified security platforms

As per IBM Institute of Business Value (https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/unified-cybersecurity-platform)  an average organization has 83 security tools from 29 vendors with 52 % of executives saying that the biggest impediment to security operations is complexity.  Making a strong case for unifying security operations under security platforms, the article further elaborates on the positive impact on efficiency, with organizations which adopt security platforms reporting 72 days less in detecting a security incident and 84 days less in solving the security incident.

With security platforms that integrate multiple tools and automate security processes bringing better ROI along with better risk visibility and mitigation, organizations that decide to go with Platform solutions are broadly faced with two choices – to buy a commercial VMS solution or develop a custom VMS solution tailored to their unique needs.

The Challenges with Commercial VMS Solutions

Many commercial VMS platforms fail to meet the dynamic security requirements of modern enterprises. Some common problems include:

• Limited Customization: Pre-packaged solutions often lack the flexibility to adapt to an organization’s unique security needs. Many commercial solutions struggle to meet an organization’s custom needs in areas like reporting, visualization, business rules and risk scoring.
• High Costs: Licensing and subscription fees for enterprise-grade VMS tools can be prohibitively expensive. Ingesting security data in a third -party commercial VMS often comes with a little less control over their own data for organizations.
• Complex Integrations: Businesses struggle to seamlessly integrate commercial VMS solutions with their existing IT infrastructure. Integrating different kinds of vulnerability scanners and collaboration tools to enable self -service capabilities is often a challenge.
• Roadmap Misalignment: Commercial VMS come with their own roadmap with the aim to service multiple organizations and sometimes accommodating the custom needs of a specific organization might lead to conflicting priorities with respect to roadmap, leading to greater time to market.
  

Why Build a Custom VMS?

A custom-built Vulnerability Management Platform (VMP) offers significant advantages over off-the-shelf solutions with following key advantages-:

1. Gives the organization freedom to define their own risk metrics and algorithms.
2. Customize MVP delivery based on tailored security needs leading to faster adoption in the organization
3. Customized asset and vulnerability prioritization rules leading to more efficient detection of risk and development of mitigation strategies.
4. Ease of development of reporting features based on the reporting needs specific to organization.
5. Better control of technical architecture and data leading to faster agility in face of evolving needs.

In many organizations, commercial VMS platforms introduce operational friction due to limited integration flexibility and rigid data models. Security teams often need to reconcile outputs from multiple tools, deal with inconsistent tagging, and manage workflows that don’t scale. A custom VMS eliminates these barriers by design.

Importantly, custom VMS solutions evolve alongside the business. They can accommodate new threat models, onboarding processes, and compliance frameworks without having to wait for vendor releases or reconfigure generic features.

Potential buyers of custom VMS solutions include but are not limited to, enterprises with complex security requirements like:

• Large enterprises with multiple departments
• Government agencies
• Highly regulated industries like banking and fintech
• Companies and technology-driven companies that require a high level of customization.
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If your security operations are constrained by the limitations of off-the-shelf tooling or you’re managing a fast-evolving environment with specialized needs, then a custom VMS is more than a tactical investment. It’s a strategic enabler of risk governance and engineering efficiency.

Developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Custom VMS

The foundation of a robust custom VMS lies in its core features. An MVP should include the following capabilities:

1. Seamless Integration with Security Tools (Plug and Play Connectors):  A vulnerability management platform should provide seamless integration, in a plug and play fashion to ingest data from multiple security tools like Tanium, Wiz, AWS SecurityHub, Qualys, Azure Sentinet   as well as collaboration tools like Service Now and Jira.
   
2. Single source of truth (SSOT): A vulnerability management platform should work on top of a golden data source of asset and vulnerability data ingested from various security and collaboration tools. The data source should have de-duplicated data from the sources and should be refreshed near real time. Asset data should be tagged to identify high priority assets, assets which are external/internal facing, ephemeral instances etc. Vulnerability data on the other hand should be tagged with the assets they are associated with alongside their criticality. Data lake should be able archive the data to provide historical trends and track vulnerability remediation status.
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3. Risk Reporting: A vulnerability management platform should provide features to generate on demand reports, custom dashboards and interactive charts and widgets to convey security risk posture at an organizational as well as at department/unit level.
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4. Custom Metrics: A vulnerability management platform should provide admin and CISO users with a rules harness on UI to easily configure custom calculations around key metrics like MTTR, Average Age, Risk score etc.
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5. Security Policy and Compliance: A vulnerability management platform should provide compliance officers with a no code way to configure security policies and SLAs to enforce and monitor compliance.
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6. Self Service – In order to improve platform adoption, a vulnerability management platform can provide self-service features like on demand and schedules scanning of assets, auto-patching of vulnerabilities, prioritizing/ dismissing vulnerabilities and raising vulnerability exceptions and tracking them.
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7. Robust & Flexible Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): A strong RBAC system ensures that users only have access to data relevant to their role, minimizing security risks. System should allow for easy and dynamic configuration of users, user groups and associated roles.
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8. ‍Conversational AI capabilities for Vulnerability Management: Integrating AI-powered chatbots and assistants can enhance efficiency by automating routine tasks, such as querying vulnerabilities, generating reports, and offering remediation recommendations.

The Future of Custom VMS Solutions

As cybersecurity threats grow more sophisticated, organizations need smarter, adaptable, and cost-effective vulnerability management solutions. A custom-built VMS provides the flexibility and control required to meet evolving security challenges while enhancing operational efficiency.

Investing in a tailored vulnerability management platform ensures businesses stay ahead of threats, optimize security workflows, and maintain compliance with industry regulations. With AI-driven automation and configurable security controls, a custom VMS is a game-changer in modern cybersecurity strategies.

At Altimetrik, we’ve designed and delivered these solutions for Fortune 500 clients—seamlessly integrating across fragmented environments, normalizing risk data, and enabling real-time response actions. Our offerings are now available via AWS Marketplace, making them easier to deploy and scale.

Are you considering a custom VMS for your organization? Contact us today to learn how a tailor-made solution can transform your vulnerability management approach!

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