Why is fast remediation important?

The cyber threat landscape is expanding at an unprecedented rate, driven by the increasing sophistication of attackers and the rapid digitization of businesses. Threat actors are no longer limited to lone hackers; today’s adversaries include organized cybercriminal groups, nation-state actors, and insider threats. In this environment, speed is of the essence. It’s no longer just about detecting and patching vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, but it’s about how fast you can do it - before attackers exploit them.

Remediation challenges

However, that’s easier said than done. There are many technical, operational, and organizational factors that complicate remediation efforts: 

• Digital expansion: The number and complexity of IT assets organizations deploy is growing exponentially, continually expanding the attack surface across cloud infrastructure, on-premises systems, endpoints, third-party software, and SaaS.
• Number of alerts: With thousands of new vulnerabilities disclosed each year, security teams are inundated with a constant stream of potential threats, making it impossible to address all. In fact, in a 2024 S&P Global survey, respondents said that they are unable to investigate nearly half (43%) of alerts.

• Siloed visibility: Many teams struggle with poor visibility across varied and complex environments, especially in hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. Siloed tools also result in significant duplication of alerts.
• Limited resources: Many organizations don’t have enough resources to address even the most critical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
• Ineffective prioritization: Lack of context and effective risk scoring result in security teams spending a large part of their time just to decide which vulnerabilities and misconfigurations present the most critical risk in the environment.
• Team friction: Divided responsibility between security and IT teams, where security teams must ensure security and compliance but lack the direct control needed to enforce policies, while engineering teams face competing priorities and tool fragmentation.

How Mondoo accelerates remediation by 3x

Given these challenges, you might be wondering how Mondoo is able to speed up remediation three-fold? It accomplishes this by helping you in three key ways: 

“Before Mondoo we had a sea of red with no clear path forward. By adopting Mondoo, we were able to identify the most important things to address so that by the time we had it fully enabled, we had only a handful of issues.”

Todd Bradfute, Senior Director of Security & Technology at SimpleRose

#1. Reduce time to decide what to remediate

With a unified platform and deep contextual visibility into all environments, Mondoo drastically cuts daily investigation times for security teams. Many security professionals spend as much as 20% of their day just sifting through alerts deciding which ones need to be addressed first, before they even start to think about remediation. Mondoo reduces this time by:

• Highlighting critical exposures: Mondoo shows the riskiest vulnerabilities in your environment right on the dashboard, by listing vulnerabilities that are internet exposed, remotely exploitable, and listening on open ports. In an instant, security teams know exactly which vulnerabilities are imperative to be fixed right away, not only saving investigation time but ensuring these dangerous risks are fixed as fast as possible.

• Displaying risk indicators: Mondoo adds clear visual tags to show why an asset is at risk, displaying factors that increase risk, but also those that reduce risk. For instance risk factors such as ‘Known exploited vulnerability,’ ‘Internet Exposed,’ or a ‘PostgreSQL service listening on a public port’ will increase the risk score, whereas mitigating factors, such as ‘SELinux is active’ or ‘AppArmor is active’ will reduce risk score. 

Displaying this in an intuitive way allows security professionals to assess real-world risk in seconds, saving hours of investigative work and enabling fast decision making. Risk factors also help platform engineers instantly understand the urgency of the requested remediation.

• Showing remediation impact: For each potential fix, Mondoo displays risk reduction points (the extent to which the fix will lower the risk in the space). This information helps security teams understand which fixes offer the best return on effort. They can also share this information with platform engineers so they can easily understand why the issue should be fixed.

• Providing strategic insights: Mondoo shows the overall security score for each of your spaces (i.e. business units). This allows you to compare the security of different environments, such as production vs. staging, and make data-driven decisions about where to apply remediation for the greatest impact.
  
  • A low score highlights an area needing immediate work, helping you direct resources to the highest business risk.
  • A high score acts as a blueprint. You can analyze what makes that environment secure and apply those best practices to other areas.
• Scoping for higher accuracy: Not all organizations have the same risk appetite. Not all assets are of the same importance. By allowing users to tag assets according to criticality, set exceptions, and customize prioritization settings, organizations can ensure that they are focused on what matters most to them.

• Set and automatically track SLAs: By setting SLAs and warning when they are in danger of not being met, security professionals know which risks need to be remediated to stay within the SLA.
• Important data at your fingertips: Teams can rapidly isolate high-impact vulnerabilities from background noise by combining filters across exploit severity, risk scores, asset metadata, and user-assigned labels. Whether you need to focus on critical CVEs in a particular environment or track all issues from a specific vendor, flexible filters help you precisely target and manage risk effectively.
  
  • Quickly build precise queries to find critical issues, instead of manually sifting through thousands of items.
  • Combine multiple layers of context in a single search. For example, find vulnerabilities on a ‘High-priority asset’ in your ‘Production’ Workspace that also have a high EPSS score and are tagged as ‘Remotely exploitable.’
  • Transform a massive dataset into a short, actionable list, enabling you to focus your remediation efforts where they will have the most impact.

Fast, yet precise targeting not only reduces investigation times but also ensures that remediation efforts are applied to the most critical vulnerabilities, maximizing the impact of fixes and preventing wasted effort on low-risk items. 

#2. Reduce time to investigate how to remediate

Mondoo provides ready-to-deploy remediation steps and code snippets, verified by Mondoo engineers to make sure the code actually solves the intended problem.

Instead of just suggesting a package name or a misconfiguration, Mondoo analyzes the asset’s unique context and provides complete, production-ready remediation solutions for your preferred remediation method:

• PowerShell scripts: It generates a complete .sh file with root checks, error handling, and comments that can be executed directly on a Linux server.
• Ansible playbooks: For teams using configuration management, Mondoo provides a perfectly formatted YAML playbook, including the hosts, variables, and tasks needed to apply a fix that’s scalable across an entire fleet.
• Terraform, CloudFormation, and more: Mondoo provides remediation code snippets for popular Infrastructure as Code (Iac) tools.
• CLI: Ready to deploy command-line instructions.
• Manual steps for UI: Description of the steps that need to be followed to remediate the issue.

Alongside every script and code snippet, Mondoo provides a concise summary of what the vulnerability is and why the generated solution is the correct and safe choice, giving engineers the confidence to act without delay.

This turns a multi-hour project of research, development, and testing into a simple, five-minute task: pick your preferred method, review the AI-generated solution, and deploy.

“Mondoo saves us on average 10 minutes per vulnerability by eliminating the need to research remediations and write the Ansible code ourselves.”

Karl Fischer, CIO at Obsidian Systems

Example: Remediating a Google Cloud Run service

For a Google Cloud Run service that is scaling too high, Mondoo provides multiple remediation paths:

• For GitOps teams, it generates the complete Terraform HCL block, showing exactly where to add the max_instance_count setting.
• For CLI users, it provides the precise gcloud command to update the service directly from a terminal.
• For manual UI updates, it provides a clear, step-by-step checklist for navigating the Google Cloud Console.

“Mondoo gives us a razor sharp answer for how to address identified problems.”

Todd Bradfute, Senior Director of Security & Technology at SimpleRose

#3. Reduce time to manage remediations

The third way that Mondoo speeds up remediations is by automating and managing the remediation process by:

• Fast take action options: Each finding, whether it’s a vulnerability or misconfiguration, includes a ‘Take action’ button that allows users to quickly forward issues for remediation. Actions can be taken for individual assets, selected assets, or all affected assets (for all or selected workspaces).

• Ticketing integrations: Mondoo integrates with ticketing systems such as Atlassian Jira, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, GitHub issues, and GitLab. Through the integration, security professionals can create tickets straight from the Mondoo platform.

Mondoo doesn't just 'fire-and-forget' tickets, but guides issues to resolution by:

• Automatically updating ticket progress after each scan
• Auto-closing tickets when all fixes have been verified
• Automatically re-opening tickets if regression occurs

• Reducing back and forth: By including all the necessary information for platform engineers to fix the issue - including asset details, risk explanation, remediation instructions, and code snippets - Mondoo minimizes the times platform engineering needs to communicate with the security team before actually remediating.
• Fitting into existing workflows: Security professionals work in security platforms, and platform engineers work in IT Service Management (ITSM) systems, such as Jira and GitHub issues. By providing all the necessary information straight in the ITSM ticket, platform engineers don’t have to switch systems, enabling them to remediate faster and avoid overlooking issues. By automatically syncing tickets in the Mondoo platform, the security team can instantly see remediation progress without needing to switch to the ITSM system.

“Mondoo has been instrumental in helping us identify vulnerabilities across our assets and has played a key role in our vulnerability ticket generation process.”

Nader Erian, Staff Security Engineer at emnify

About Mondoo

Mondoo is an exposure management platform that identifies, prioritizes, and addresses vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in your entire IT infrastructure and SDLC from a single interface — covering on-prem, cloud, SaaS, and endpoints. Unlike siloed approaches, Mondoo enables you to quickly understand your most urgent risks and initiate fast remediation, ensuring optimized security efforts and significantly improving security posture. 

To learn more about the Mondoo platform, schedule a demo with one of our experts.