How Three InsightVM Customers Scaled Their Vulnerability Management Programs with Rapid7

Last updated at Tue, 14 Nov 2023 15:10:43 GMT

Managing the totality of vulnerabilities in your IT environment is a tall order. To run your vulnerability management program as a well-oiled machine, you need all the pieces in place, from visibility of all of your assets to effective reporting mechanisms that demonstrate value. But even with the best laid plans, taking full control of the wheel requires technology that supports the goals of your program.

We sat down with customers Peter Macarthur-King, Chief Information Security Officer of SAI Global, Vishnu Varma, Security Architect at Trov, and Gael Frouin, Information Security Officer at a higher education institution, to get a firsthand perspective of why they chose to partner with Rapid7 for vulnerability risk management (often switching from other vendors), and what made InsightVM the ideal solution for gaining complete visibility, driving efficiency, and proving the efficacy of their security programs.

Gaining complete visibility into risk

Visibility translates insight on knowing what to protect, how to protect it, and what you need to protect it from. With many vulnerability management solutions available, Rapid7 prides itself on allowing you to see all of your assets across your modern environments, regardless of whether they’re local, remote, cloud-based, or containerized.

Varma, Security Architect at Trov, mentioned that InsightVM was able to deliver real-time visibility with fewer false positives. He said that before he had even joined the firm, Trov’s first challenge was to find a new vulnerability management provider. Because its existing Qualys solution was generating too many false positives on production machines, the firm needed more clarity into this crucial area of the IT environment to better manage vulnerability risk.

Varma said that with Rapid7’s InsightVM, they now have a “centralized platform where multiple stakeholders can log in to view any suspicious activity, as well as make any policy updates to CSP, or look at any dependencies related to third-party packages and vulnerabilities.”

This sentiment is echoed by Gael Frouin and Macarthur-King, who both mentioned how such visibility has helped them better assess their assets.

“With InsightVM, I configured it to be able to track the configuration and have an assessment of that configuration from our InsightVM platform, which is such a gain of visibility” Frouin said.

Similarly, Macarthur-King added that the first thing he discovered with InsightVM was that he had broader visibility into his environment. The way the system identified and brought risk into clear focus was more effective than simply counting common vulnerabilities and exposures.

“Rapid7 makes it extremely clear to see where you stand,” he said. “So, if I'm telling a peer what they will get out of the product suite, it would be that it has sufficient information, presented in an extremely clear manner that shows them that there’s an issue and that action needs to be taken.”

Driving efficiency across vulnerability management and incident detection and response

We know that there’s no shortage of work to be done for security professionals, making speed and efficiency key. On the recommendation of a colleague, Macarthur-King decided to look at InsightIDR, Rapid7’s cloud SIEM, and InsightVM. As a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, InsightIDR helps organizations make better and faster decisions across the incident detection and response lifecycle. The two solutions share an endpoint agent, thus enhancing visibility and making data analysis significantly less tedious and fragmented.

“In what felt like almost overnight, it was across our entire organization. I think within a month, we'd gone from zero to the best part of 4,000 assets,” Macarthur-King said. “The rapid deployment and scalability of the solutions was second to none, not to mention the capabilities it now provided us.”

Frouin also said he felt the impact of InsightVM’s speed and automation, saying, “It’s a tremendous gain in terms of speed and time to recovery from a misconfiguration.” He added that the automation in InsightVM means resolving things within minutes or a few hours, rather than days.

Proving efficacy

Rapid7 Support is always looking to ensure that your InsightVM product is working properly and meeting your security goals.

“My experience with Rapid7 has always been great. Each time we try to evaluate new products or have some new use cases, they’re really interactive and really helpful,” Varma from Trov said. “And any support request gets answered within the same day. It’s exactly what we need.”

Both Peter Macarthur-King and Frouin shared their experience with the support and service provided by Rapid7. Macarthur-King noted, “I’m now able to provide information and clear reports to distributed teams, which allows me to maintain the momentum of improving security awareness across diverse divisions, and the product has made this possible if not easy.”

Ultimately, Rapid7 aims to make the customer experience as seamless as possible, and we’re thrilled when customers like Frouin are able to say, "My Rapid7 experience has been great. I got quality service, quality products. Products that are easy to use and to start with."