Are your assets feeling a bit exposed and vulnerable? There’s every chance they are.
Understand how continuous, risk‑based vulnerability management helps Australian organisations identify, prioritise, and reduce cyber risk across their digital assets.
Before the internet (let alone cloud computing) was even a thing, Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell sang: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?”
While in 1970 Joni was bemoaning the loss of the environment, her words are a good summary of the state of many organisational assets today. According to Gartner-cited research, around two-thirds of organisations report gaps in the visibility of their digital and internet-facing assets.
Which begs the question, how can you defend what you can’t see? And by the time it’s gone (bad), it can be too late.
What is vulnerability management?
For starters, it’s an ongoing (not a one-off or even annual) exercise. The vulnerability management process is a continuous and risk-driven exercise - identifying, assessing, prioritising, and addressing security weaknesses across your organisation’s IT environment. Due to the pace of constantly changing infrastructure, software and threats, the process is a cycle: Set. Start. Run. Repeat.
The objective? To reduce the risk of cyber-attack through vulnerable assets.
What are some of those risks? Preventable risks include vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions that, if exploited by cybercriminals, can significantly disrupt your short and long-term operations.
At its core, vulnerability management answers (and addresses) these four questions:
What assets do we have?
What vulnerabilities exist across those assets?
Which vulnerabilities actually matter most?
What should we fix first to reduce real risk?
To note: Vulnerability scanning shouldn’t be confused with vulnerability management. Scanning doesn’t fix or prioritise vulnerabilities – it’s a component of vulnerability management.
The case of the missing assets
Why do so many organisations struggle with visibility of their assets?
Volume for starters: While there’s no definitive research or reports, the industry consensus is that most medium‑to‑large organisations manage tens of thousands of digital assets, while large enterprises routinely exceed 100,000.
And then, there’s breadth: Think cloud and ephemeral workloads. Shadow IT and SaaS sprawl. Unmanaged IoT / OT devices. Separate tooling across IT, security and cloud teams. And manual or spreadsheet‑based inventories.
With that volume and breadth of exposure, the opportunities for enterprising cybercriminals abound.
What is Vulnerability Management as a Service?
Vulnerability management as a Service (aka VMaaS) is a managed, continuous service, not a point-in-time scan. Key elements include continuous monitoring of your networks, endpoints, and cloud environments.
The VMaaS model consists of automated vulnerability management tools and human-augmented services. It focuses on reducing your attack surface and improving your security posture, and goes beyond just defence to support compliance, reporting, and prioritisation. And as an Australian organisation, you can also expect it to align with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) key controls.
What will VMaaS do for you? (And what won’t it do?)
“What’s in it for me?” is a good question. A well‑delivered VMaaS offering will deliver these outcomes:
Continuous visibility of vulnerabilities across agreed assets
Reduced operational burden on your internal IT and security teams
Actionable prioritisation, not long lists of vulnerabilities
Expert human-led oversight, interpretation, and accountability
Improved risk posture over time, not just records or proof of compliance
Predictable, subscription‑based delivery
It’s only fair that you also know what VMaaS isn’t.
It’s not a silver bullet but a risk reduction service. It doesn’t guarantee that all vulnerabilities will be magically eliminated, and it won’t automatically patch all your systems without approval. It doesn’t offer protection against zero‑day exploitation without some help from other services, and doesn’t replace incident response, EDR, or SOC services (they’re complementary).
What’s the VMaaS delivery process?
If your internal team lacks time, scale, or specialist capabilities in vulnerability management, then VMaaS is for you. But what does it involve?
As mentioned earlier, it’s a repeatable process, not a one-off exercise.
Onboarding and scoping: VMaaS begins with scoping – working with you to define which of your assets are in scope, agree on scanning methods, and identify business‑critical systems and risk tolerance. Reporting is also aligned with your governance and compliance needs. This reduces noise and ensures that the vulnerability findings are relevant and actionable rather than generic.
Continuous asset discovery and scanning: Once active, you’ll have continuous or scheduled vulnerability scanning across your agreed environment, keeping coverage up to date as new CVEs appear (for context, we’re talking about 170-175 new CVEs daily in 2026). The VMaaS service continuously detects changes, such as when you’ve added new assets, removed systems, or experienced configuration drift, across infrastructure, software, cloud workloads, and internet-facing services.
Risk-based prioritisation: VMaaS focuses on expert-led, risk-based prioritisation rather than endless lists of raw vulnerabilities. Findings are analysed based on factors such as exploitability, severity, and asset criticality, with low‑risk and non‑actionable issues filtered out. At Baidam, we enhance this process with threat intelligence and active exploit data, ensuring that our remediation efforts focus on vulnerabilities that materially reduce attack risk.
Remediation guidance and coordination: VMaaS doesn’t automatically remediate all issues. Instead, you receive clear guidance on patches, configuration changes, and mitigations tailored to your environment. Depending on the service model, remediation can be advisory, co‑managed, or partially automated – so you can stay in control, without going it alone.
Reporting, metrics, and governance: Regular reporting that shows current vulnerability risk, progress over time, remediation status, and compliance‑aligned views suitable for audits and regulators. These reports are typically delivered monthly or quarterly, with alerts for newly exploitable or high‑risk issues. This supports governance and executive oversight in addition to technical teams.
The fit: Cyber security and vulnerability management
Where does vulnerability management fit in the cybersecurity equation?
It’s the layer that sits below detection and response, but above basic hygiene in the overall cybersecurity stack. It serves as the (essential) connective layer that reduces exploitable risk before incidents occur and gives defensible risk insights to your organisational leadership.
Guardians of the (vulnerability) galaxy
Baidam’s VMaaS offers a business-critical blend of technology through our partner, Tenable – a world-leading vulnerability and exposure management software vendor known for its depth in the enterprise and government sectors - and our human-led expertise.
Critically, we have two Tenable Guardians on staff, which (just quietly) is a bit of a big deal.
Tenable Guardian is an invitation-only recognition and advocacy program. As Tenable Guardians, our experts are acknowledged for their skills, have early visibility into new Tenable capabilities and roadmap items, and have direct access to a network of Tenable Tier II engineers.
With great technology and a team trained to scan and protect your environment, you’ll know exactly what you’ve got, what’s at risk – and what’s not.