Internal Vulnerability Assessment of IT Infrastructure

Abstract

Today IT infrastructures are dynamic, requiring multitude of defense measures to effectively prevent attacks and efficiently mitigate vulnerabilities across the entire enterprise. Organizations must not only be aware of the threats, but also the impact of those threats on their infrastructure. Vulnerability assessment is a powerful proactive process for identifying vulnerabilities and securing an enterprise IT infrastructure. Vulnerability assessment is a continuous process, which mitigate the risk of any type of external attacks on an IT infrastructure. Compromising the organizational assets security leads to loss of valuable information, finances and even the invaluable reputation of the business. Foolproof security cannot be ensured and there is no guarantee of a 100% secure environment but still these methodologies try to find out any loopholes in the IT infrastructure, which can be taken care of in order to mitigate the risks involved. This work talks about the internal vulnerability assessment in details and touches the external vulnerability assessment on a basic level. The methodology of vulnerability assessment and how it can be done to achieve the desired outcomes is discussed. Various tools and techniques have been discussed for the vulnerability assessment. In the last part, recommendations are provided to organizations for ensuring their infrastructure security based on vulnerability assessment. This study focuses on the assessment of target organization’s IT infrastructure for vulnerabilities and at the end summarizes recommendations for those vulnerabilities.