What Enterprises Get Wrong About Vulnerability Management ROI

Enterprises spend staggering amounts of money on vulnerability management programs, and yet precious few can articulate what they have gained in return. The dominant assumption is that fixing more issues must equate to more security, but this is an illusion. The premise is also built on bad incentives.

The value and effectiveness of most vendors and internal teams are measured by volume. That is to say: how many vulnerabilities are discovered, how many patches get applied, how many dashboards are cleared, how many “critical” findings are ticked off the list? But none of those metrics actually correlate with reduced financial exposure. I know it seems odd, but truly, they are not correlated.

Not at all.

They are activity measures, not outcome measures.

Think of it like walking into a casino. If your friend tells you to place chips on every number at the roulette table, you can say you “covered the board,” but you haven’t created any advantage. Your friend has given you bad advice. He has statistically guaranteed a loss, because the house edge eats you alive. The longer you play like that the more likely you’ll end up losing everything. Why would you take advice from someone who tells you to play like this?

Fixing every single vulnerability is the same game. Your VM program “helpfully” tells you to fix all the issues from high to low, which burns time and money chasing issues that have no bearing on actual losses, while the clock runs down on the ones that do.

And why shouldn’t VM companies give this bad advice? For the companies selling vulnerability management platforms, there is no cost to flooding you with findings. They win by keeping you busy… and poor. Your endless stream of closed tickets is their “proof” of value, even if none of it reduces loss.  In fact, many companies purchase VM programs after a bakeoff when they see that vendor X found “more” than vendor Y. More what though? More harmless vulns? How is that helping your company?

So again, what incentive does your VM program have to reduce your workload? I dare say, none at all, or worse yet, they are incentivized to find more because it makes it easier to sell against their competitors.

What’s lost in the noise is the simple truth that not all vulnerabilities matter. Exploitability, attacker behavior, and business impact are the attributes that determine risk. A trivial privilege escalation weakness on an internal device might sit in your queue for years without consequence. At the same time, a single unpatched remote access flaw in an exposed system that adversaries are currently scanning the Internet for could bring down a critical revenue line today. You are always gambling when you are deciding what to fix and in what order. But, if you treat all issues the same, you are still gambling but giving away any financial edge.

It’s no wonder people think that security is a cost center. It likely has been, given the way the VM programs have been prioritizing.

The fixation on “vuln zero” captures the pathology perfectly. It’s a money pit. The number of vulnerabilities grows faster than any organization can remediate, and attempting to eliminate them all is like trying to bankrupt a casino by playing longer. The longer you play, the more you lose. Enterprises end up exhausting their teams, draining budgets, and still missing the handful of issues that matter, because they never actually prioritized against loss.

ROSI (return on security investment) in vulnerability management should not be measured by throughput or vuln-remediation rates. It should be measured by avoided loss. Every dollar spent fixing a vulnerability that will never be exploited is a dollar not spent on the one that will. The job is not to fix everything, but to fix the things that shift the odds in your favor.

Otherwise, go to Vegas and start betting on everything - it will have the same outcome.