How the Vulnerability Operations Centre serves as an essential mission control for vulnerabilities

The vulnerability management ‘to do’ list can feel like a perpetual loop. No sooner have the latest batch of security updates been handled than it’s time to start over again. 

Indeed, security teams weighed down with manual processes and siloed structures are likely to find they can’t even complete one set of vulnerability management tasks without others needing urgent attention. In the absence of a coordinated strategy, critical risks mount up and begin to slip through the cracks, increasing exposure to attacks.

It’s time for a shift. Security teams must transition from ad-hoc urgency to a mission control mindset powered by adopting a Vulnerability Operations Centre (VOC) approach. The next evolution of the SOC, the VOC enables teams to centralise, streamline, and strengthen vulnerability management.

Why traditional vulnerability management is falling behind 

The number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) has been increasing steadily over the last few years, but the growth is reaching exponential rates. More than 40,000 new CVEs were recorded in 2024 alone, averaging at around 108 new threats every day of the year. 

Any vulnerability management setup still relying on manual processes to track and fix vulnerabilities has an impossible task ahead of them. Teams that must crawl through spreadsheets to work out their next priority will never get close to getting through their backlog, let alone working out a proper set of priorities.

Many vulnerability management strategies are also over-reliant on single sources of truth for discovering new vulnerabilities and prioritising their activity. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has often served as the go-to source of information but last year suffered a major slowdown due to a lack of resources and funding, causing a large backlog of unprocessed vulnerabilities. Organisations without the ability to proactively identify and prioritise vulnerabilities found themselves without a clear direction. As highlighted by CISA’s Vulnerability Response Section Chief earlier this year, security teams need clarity, context and actionable insights to make vulnerability management workable. 

These issues are compounded by siloes in both tools and processes. Teams must often move between multiple sets of overlapping but disconnected tools, wasting time and leading to gaps and duplicated effort. Different teams such as security, IT and DevOps may also be working in isolation, leading to more redundancy and misaligned priorities. 

Taken together, this results in a highly reactive, fragmented approach that leaves organisations at risk of missing high-priority vulnerabilities which are being actively exploited by threat actors. 

Organisations still struggling to get to grips with vulnerability management urgently need a more organised and efficient approach. This is where the VOC comes in.

Introducing the VOC as mission control 

As the name might suggest, the Vulnerability Operations Centre takes its cues from the Security Operations Centre (SOC). Just as SOCs establish a single point of visibility and control for identifying and responding to security risks, the VOC creates a consolidated, holistic approach exclusively to vulnerability management. 

The strategy has gained significant traction over the last couple of years, and more CISOs are now on the path to implementing a centralised hub for vulnerability management. The goal is to achieve real-time and contextualised visibility into all vulnerabilities, assets, and risk levels across the entire business. 

It also bridges SOCs and vulnerability management programmes, unifying stakeholders across security, IT, and DevOps teams.

The key to achieving all this is the implementation of a highly automated approach to vulnerability management. Data from multiple sources, such as external threat intel feeds or databases like the NVD, and internal scanning tools and asset inventories, is aggregated together and de-duplicated into a single pool. 

Vulnerabilities are then prioritised based on several factors, including severity, exploitability, and asset context. Crucially, this should be a highly bespoke process customised to the organisation’s specific risk tolerance, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Priorities need to match the reality of business operations closely. 

Key advantages of a VOC for modern security teams 

A fully operational VOC can immediately start delivering tangible business benefits. Crucially, teams will be able to pinpoint the vulnerabilities that really matter and tackle them quickly. Not all CVEs are created equal, and context is critical for proper prioritisation. For example, a mid-severity vulnerability on an exposed system may be riskier than a critical flaw with no exploit available on an isolated server.

With accurate and reliable data to guide them, the team will always be addressing those exploits with the greatest risk factor based on asset exposure, exploit availability, and business impact to focus efforts where they’re needed most.

The VOC also enables a highly automated and efficient operation. Vulnerability triage, risk analysis, and alert prioritisation are all prime areas for automation, freeing security teams to focus on strategic decisions.

This not only enables the team to cut through the noise to identify and respond to the most critical issues, but also helps avoid alert fatigue, keeping personnel from feeling burnt out by an endless list of manual tasks. 

These tactical benefits add up to the strategic result of greater security and resilience for the business. The enterprise has a reduced chance of suffering a breach and all the operational, financial and legal issues that come with it. This proactive stance helps reframe vulnerability management from a necessary evil to a business enabler that helps the company operate with more freedom. 

From firefighting to foresight

By establishing a centralised hub to act as mission control for all things vulnerability management, VOCs give security teams the tools to anticipate and prevent attacks, not just respond to them. 

While CVE volumes are only likely to keep increasing year over year, those armed with VOC’s real-time intelligence and automated workflows can safely ignore the vast majority and confidently focus on the handful that pose a real risk to their business.