What does your to do list look like? If it’s anything like mine, it includes things like grocery shopping, laundry, buying dog food, putting gas in the car, sweeping the floor, walking the dog, and cooking dinner. Colloquial wisdom holds that a good number of to do items for each day is roughly 6-12 items, assuming that each take 30 minutes to an hour. That’s nice and all… but we haven’t even gotten to my work to-do list. So how, as humans, do we manage to get all of this done? The answer, obviously enough, is prioritization.

pri·or·i·ti·za·tion

/ˌprīˌôrədəˈzāSH(ə)n,ˌprīˌôrəˌtīˈzāSH(ə)n/

noun

the action or process of deciding the relative importance or urgency of a thing or things.

We all know how to do this; we do it literally every day of our lives. Buying dog food is more important than sweeping the floor, because the dog gets grumpy when he runs out of food. Easy enough, right?

But what about more complicated issues? What about things where we can’t always tell what’s more important? What about issues like cyber security, where every report has a potentially catastrophic outcome? What is your process then, to decide the importance of a thing?

There’s an app for that. Sort of.  Vulnerability Management is a type of tool designed to be able to help provide insight into how to prioritize overly length InfoSec to do lists, with the ability to get clear views of not only what your potential exposure is, but how pressing each item is. Flexera is taking it one step farther, by integrating the proprietary research from the Secunia team, and applying it towards enabling prioritization and optimization of processes for managing software vulnerabilities to mitigate exposures, before the likelihood of exploitation increases.

By understanding and prioritizing the criticality of patches applicable to your environment leveraging our vulnerability and threat intelligence insights, you’re able to get your list down to a manageable number – and still buy the dog his food on the way home.