Cybersecurity software provider Qualys Inc. today announced a new release of its Qualys Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response.

The new cloud-based solution is designed to deliver unprecedented insights into an organization’s unique risk posture, along with the ability to use drag and drop workflows to orchestrate responses. Qualys VMDR 2.0 is said to provide insight that security and information technology teams need to focus on the vulnerabilities that genuinely reduce risk.

The beta testing results for the release are impressive. Qualys VMDR 2.0 beta customers, with TruRisk capability enabled, prioritized on average 28% fewer critical vulnerabilities across a sample size of 2.6 million assets and 74 million detections, according to the company. Simultaneously, they were able to reduce risk on average by 23% and, in some cases, as high as 50%.

Qualys VMDR 2.0 with TruRisk allows security and IT teams to reduce risk with holistic scoring – quantifying risk across the entire attack surface, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and digital certificates. The company says the service can exploit intelligence from hundreds of sources, including Shodan’s attack surface exposure data, to deprioritize vulnerabilities automatically if compensating controls are in force, track risk reduction trends over time and help organizations measure and report on the effectiveness of their cybersecurity program across hybrid environments.

The service also offers rule-based integrations between VMDR and IT service management tools such as ServiceNow and JIRA, along with dynamic vulnerability tagging. That allows users to assign remediation tickets automatically to prioritized vulnerabilities and bridge the gap between security and IT teams.

Preemptive attack alerts with external threat intelligence from more than 180,000 vulnerabilities and 25 threat and exploit intelligence sources are natively correlated with vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to alert teams on vulnerabilities exploited by malware or those used in an active malicious campaign. Qualys Qflow technology saves teams valuable time and resources with drag-and-drop visual workflows to automate time-consuming and complex vulnerability management tasks, such as vulnerability assessments for ephemeral cloud assets, alerting for high-profile threats or quarantining high-risk assets.

“In this era of increasing attacks and board-level attention on cyber resiliency, efficiently managing cyber risk is more important than ever,” Sumedh Thakar, president and chief executive officer of Qualys, said in a statement. “With VMDR 1.0, we innovated by bringing the four core elements of vulnerability management into a seamless workflow to help organizations efficiently respond to threats. We’re changing the game again with VMDR 2.0.”

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