Ditch the Checkboxes: A Guide to Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Your cybersecurity team scans, patches, and reports vulnerabilities daily, yet breaches persist, and maintenance backlogs keep growing. The issue isn’t just effort, it’s misaligned priorities. We’ve been conditioned to accept compliance-driven security, which creates the illusion of protection but fails to reduce real-world risk.

Chances are, you're prioritizing vulnerabilities flagged by compliance frameworks—even when they pose little actual threat—while overlooking the ones attackers are actively exploiting.

It’s time to move beyond checkbox security to a risk-based approach—one that prioritizes vulnerabilities based on business impact, exposure, and exploitability, not just severity scores.

Raf Borges, Director of Security Operations at Axonius, has worked with multiple organizations making this transition. He’s seen firsthand why many teams struggle and how they can break free.

In this guide, we’ll share his insights and break down how to shift from compliance-driven to risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM).

Why Your Vulnerability Management Process Feels Stuck

If you’re like most security teams, you probably follow a five-step vulnerability management process.

This “checkbox approach” feels like we are making progress, but it’s often implemented without the necessary context and prioritization. Raf notes that we have to start with the simple questions.

"Are we impacted by the CVE? And if we are, what's the exposure of this impact?” said Raf. “A vulnerability on an internal server that has no access to anything is not as critical as one that is on a public-facing web server that has critical data. The other things that we look at are: Is this something that is currently being exploited?”

The issue isn’t just the volume of vulnerabilities—it’s that you need a risk-based method to prioritize what to fix based on your constraints. Consider these two vulnerabilities:

• A high-severity CVSS 9.0 vulnerability on an internal, isolated system.
• A medium-severity CVSS 6.5 vulnerability on an exposed, mission-critical application.

The second vulnerability poses a higher business risk, yet your team might prioritize patching the first one solely because of its CVSS score. This reliance on a single metric can trap you in an endless cycle of patching without achieving real progress.

"Having that context around what that resource is providing to your business is also important—having some asset criticality rating is very important when you’re assessing these things,” said Raf.

Tips to Shift to Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM)

The goal should be to shift from a checkbox-driven mindset to one that truly reduces risk. That starts with changing how vulnerabilities are prioritized.

1. Patching Strategy

• Traditional Approach: Patch based on CVSS scores.

• Risk-Based Approach: Prioritize based on business impact, exposure, and exploitability.

2. Vulnerability Prioritization

• Traditional Approach: Treat all vulnerabilities equally.

• Risk-Based Approach: Focus on high-risk vulnerabilities that attackers actively exploit or have a high likelihood of being exploited.

3. Vulnerability Discovery

• Traditional Approach: Rely on scanners for vulnerability discovery.

• Risk-Based Approach: Use real-time asset visibility to understand security gaps.

4. Compliance vs. Real-World Protection

• Traditional Approach: Patch to meet compliance mandates.

• Risk-Based Approach: Automatically patch to protect critical systems from real-world threats. Your patching cadence is in alignment with your vulnerability SLA.

5. Team Collaboration

• Traditional Approach: Work in silos, disconnected from IT and business teams.

• Risk-Based Approach: Align security operations with business risk and IT priorities. You have a predefined standard to assess and “ring the fire alarm”  on vulnerabilities that need to be patched sooner than the standard SLA/patch window.  

Four Things Successful Security Teams Do Differently

Security teams that successfully shift to risk-based vulnerability management do more than scan and patch. They align security priorities with business needs. The most effective teams move beyond compliance checkboxes and build security programs around context, automation, and asset intelligence.

1. They Focus on What Truly Matters

Not every vulnerability needs immediate attention. The key is understanding which vulnerabilities could lead to real-world attacks. 

Security leaders who successfully break free from the scan-and-patch cycle build their security strategy around risk, not regulation.

That means factoring in:

• The importance of the asset to business operations.

• Whether the vulnerability is exposed to attackers.

• Whether it’s already being exploited in the wild.

• Whether you already have mitigating controls. 

2. They Create Processes That Make Sense

Effective security teams collaborate with IT and Infrastructure to establish an automated patching process aligned with vulnerability management SLAs. 

High or critical security fixes in monthly OS and application vendor patches should follow a structured timeline (e.g., high severity = 35 days) and be classified appropriately to avoid unnecessary tickets. This ensures teams can focus on higher-risk vulnerabilities outside the standard SLA.

For critical or zero-day vulnerabilities, successful teams have a standardized escalation process requiring faster patching. This “fire alarm” process should be a core component of this strategy.

The best teams:

• Automate routine patching to reduce manual effort.

• Focus on vulnerabilities outside standard SLAs that pose real risk.

• Use a structured escalation process for critical threats.

 "Before we send out this Slack message to IT about this critical CVE, internally as a team, let’s assess it first, and say, ‘Okay, do we think the risk outweighs the effort that is going to be involved in pulling that fire alarm here?’” said Raf.

“Because a lot of times—the answer is no.”

3. They Use Automation to Reduce Noise

Prioritization is the biggest challenge in vulnerability management. Without automation, teams waste time sorting through thousands of vulnerabilities instead of fixing what matters most.

Automating the assessment process means you’re better able to prioritize where to focus your attention. Before taking action, you need to determine whether you’re dealing with mere smoke or a real fire. 

Automation helps teams:

• Filter out low-risk vulnerabilities and reduce alert fatigue.

• Filter out vulnerabilities within your agreed SLA. 

• Track which vulnerabilities attackers are actually exploiting.

• Align security priorities with business impact.

4. They Gain Full Asset Visibility

Security teams can’t secure what they can’t see. Without a real-time, up-to-date inventory of IT assets, critical vulnerabilities go unnoticed. Making the shift to risk-based vulnerability management requires a more information-driven, data-powered approach. 

The best teams:

• Eliminate blind spots by continuously discovering and tracking all assets.

• Prioritize vulnerabilities based on where they exist in the environment.

• Centralize vulnerability management in a platform that de-duplicates vulnerabilities reported from different tools.

• Reduce wasted effort on patching systems that don’t pose a real risk or are within your SLA.

Level Up Vulnerability Management with a Risk-Based Approach

Even when security teams recognize flaws in their vulnerability management process, shifting to risk-based prioritization is challenging. It requires breaking long-standing habits and challenging the instinct to patch everything with a high severity score.

The teams that succeed prioritize context over checkboxes and focus on real risks. If you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels on low-risk vulnerabilities, check out our webinar Is CTEM the New Zero Trust? to get even more actionable tips on prioritizing what truly matters.