Vulnerability management is undergoing a seismic shift. The risk based prioritization from Vulnerability Risk Management (VRM) has combined with attack surface management (ASM) to form exposure management and continuous security testing — two emerging practices that prioritize visibility and prioritization over remediation and response. While these newer market segments have yet to achieve widespread adoption, their emergence has reshaped the vulnerability management space. But their emphasis on visibility and prioritization neglects the third principle of proactive security: Remediation. This is where Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) Solutions come into play, because UVM solutions don’t just aggregate vulnerability findings, they unify remediation efforts.

Unified Vulnerability Management: More Than Aggregation

Unified Vulnerability Management is not simply about consolidating data; it represents the unification of remediation efforts across diverse systems and teams. UVM solutions serve as centralized repositories for vulnerability findings, enabling streamlined orchestration of response efforts and providing enhanced tracking of remediation progress.

But while the vulnerability management market continues to evolve, some challenges persist. To understand how organizations can optimize their vulnerability management approach, it’s crucial to examine what has changed and what remains constant.

What’s Changed in Vulnerability Management?

Preferred Sources of Vulnerability Assessments
The way organizations gather vulnerability data has changed. Organizations increasingly rely on existing tools—such as endpoint security agents, network vulnerability scanning platforms, and SecOps systems—to maximize efficiency. The focus has shifted toward leveraging existing sources for visibility and integrating them into unified vulnerability management to enable comprehensive assessments across diverse asset classes like cloud environments, applications, and IoT devices. While some UVM vendors provide their own assessments, others require ingestions from third-party vulnerability assessment providers to orchestrate response efforts.

Prioritization Strategies
Exposure management is redefining how vulnerabilities are prioritized. Traditional CVE-based prioritization is evolving into strategies informed by attack path analysis and validation, which evaluates weaknesses along potential attack paths. Continuous security testing further validates which vulnerabilities are exploitable, ensuring vulnerabilities are exploitable to validate true exposure. UVM solutions must adapt to support these advanced prioritization methods, whether natively or through integration with exposure management platforms and continuous security testing solutions. Additionally, the use of commercial vulnerability intelligence—beyond public feeds like CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) – is becoming essential for organizations seeking to stay ahead of known threats.

What Has Stayed the Same in Vulnerability Management?

Remediation Processes
Despite advancements in prioritization and visibility, remediation processes remain a persistent challenge. While UVM solutions can initiate and monitor workflows for vulnerability notification, patch management, and remediation actions, they cannot fix broken processes on their own. Organizations still require strong patch management practices and active commitment from remediation owners—including IT, cloud, and development teams—to reduce exposure risks effectively.

UVM solutions offer recommendations and prioritize actions, but the responsibility to execute and conclude remediation efforts lies with the organization. Many vulnerability management teams still rely on IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms to track vulnerability response, while fewer use UVM directly to manage workflows. Automation features, such as auto-deploying patches, remain underutilized, with most organizations favoring automated ticket creation and notification systems over fully automated remediation.

Ensure your remediation strategy aligns with your organizational preferences and characteristics. For example, if you’re a development heavy organization, then generating remediation tickets into your developers preferred ITSM for visibility is likely best. But if your organization responds well to centralized dashboards and gamification, then consider UVM solutions as the book of records for remediations. Experiment with auto remediation safely as these capabilities are still evolving. Consider unique factors from your local environment, such as high memory utilization or unusual configurations or GPO policies for auto remediation plans. Auto remediation doesn’t mean blindly patching, but is an opportunity for streamline patch test and rollout plans.

Forrester clients can read the full report The Forrester Wave™: Unified Vulnerability Solutions, Q3 2025 now! Use this report for more insights on the market and the 10 vendors that matter most. If you have any questions about the changes happening in the unified vulnerability management market, book an inquiry or guidance session with me.