Smart Vulnerability Prioritization is the Key to Unlocking Exposure Management

While connected devices are fundamental to modern operations, IoT, IoMT, and OT assets introduce unique security challenges. Resource constraints, inherent difficulty in patching, and the massive scale of interconnected physical assets can generate overwhelming organizational risk. With potentially thousands of devices deployed across an enterprise, prioritizing and remediating critical vulnerabilities becomes a significant and complex security challenge.

How can your organization identify and prioritize the vulnerabilities that matter most, across all cyber assets?  

Asimily’s Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel offers a structured, data-driven process that takes every possible weakness across your environment and distills it into a focused, actionable list of what needs to be fixed first, and why. 

What is Asimily’s Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel? 

The Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel is Asimily’s proprietary methodology for analyzing and prioritizing the risk of your organization’s full spectrum of cyber assets – from IT to IoT, OT, and IoMT. Since Asimily has the unique ability to gain visibility into all of these cyber assets, Asimily’s vulnerability prioritization funnel creates a comprehensive to-do list of actions for mitigating risk across all cyber assets. 

Simply offering a prioritization matrix without the technology to operationalize this would create another data source for security teams to review. Asimily’s Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel is natively built into the platform, helping teams arrive at the best possible action to take to mitigate risk within the context of the organization’s network.

How does Asimily’s Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel work?

Many platforms provide capabilities to help organizations understand the vulnerabilities associated with each asset within an organization. Ultimately, this can be broken down to four major steps in this process, all of which are uniquely enhanced by Asimily’s technology– creating Asimily’s Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel: 

1. Build A Complete Inventory Of Your Connected Devices 

Asimily begins by creating a high-fidelity digital twin of every cyber asset in your organization. Through passive network discovery, intelligent traffic analysis, and safe data enrichment, the platform builds a living inventory that reflects the true state of your environment.

At the same time, Asimily’s platform continuously ingests vulnerability intelligence from sources like NVD, ICS-CERT, and FDA databases, as well as proprietary parsing of disclosures from major vendors.

The result is a complete, contextualized view of all assets and potential vulnerabilities, grounded in your operational data. This inventory provides a foundation for the rest of the process, ensuring every decision downstream is based on accurate, up-to-date intelligence.

2. Likelihood of An Attacker Exploiting a Vulnerability in Your Environment 

Not every vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker in your environment. Traditional vulnerability management often stops at severity ratings. This step of the process goes beyond that, quantifying the likelihood that an attacker could exploit a given vulnerability within your network.

Using probabilistic modeling and using Asimily Labs’ research on the vulnerabilities, Asimily maps each vulnerability to real-world attacker behaviors (based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework) and compares against your environment’s defenses, configurations, and segmentation controls.

This produces a true likelihood score, which measures whether a vulnerability is realistically exploitable in a given environment, not just theoretically dangerous or exploitable in the wild. By modeling the exact path an attacker would take and comparing it against your specific infrastructure, Asimily quantifies the actual probability of a potential attack.

3. Quantify the Potential Impact of a Vulnerability

Technical risk touches every part of your business, and so it’s important to understand a vulnerability’s potential effect on an organization and other vectors of a vulnerability.

Asimily calculates business impact by evaluating each asset’s role in your organization. Is it a life-sustaining medical device? A production-critical PLC? A high-value data hub? By integrating exploit intelligence (such as CISA KEV and EPSS scores), device criticality, potential lateral movement, and even financial and regulatory implications, Asimily quantifies the real-world consequences of a potential breach.

This gives your organization a clear understanding of how risk intersects with business operations and helps leaders prioritize the vulnerabilities that actually threaten patient safety, uptime, or revenue.

4. Prioritize, Simulate, and Mitigate Risk

Once all the calculations are made, Asimily creates a stack-ranked list of vulnerabilities, organized by true risk. The goal? To focus your resources on the top 1% of issues that pose the most significant threat.

Each recommendation is tied to an actionable mitigation plan, from simple configuration changes and compensating controls to patching options where available. Your team receives a clear, prioritized work plan designed for maximum efficiency. For almost every risk, the platform recommends the simplest fix. This includes a library of over 180 targeted, non-disruptive compensating controls, like disabling an unnecessary service or blocking a specific port, that are designed to break a specific MITRE ATT&CK chain.

Before taking any action, your team can use Asimily’s Risk Simulator to model how each fix will reduce overall risk exposure. Risk Simulator shows exactly how much risk is reduced for every action your team takes. This makes remediation efforts measurable, defensible, and efficient.

Vulnerability management is very often reactive. In this case, the vulnerability prioritization funnel becomes a continuous feedback loop, transforming vulnerability management into a proactive risk reduction strategy.

Turning Insight into Impact

The Asimily Vulnerability Prioritization Funnel doesn’t just make vulnerability management smarter; it makes it achievable. By combining deep technical insight with contextual business awareness, Asimily empowers your organization to focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most, take the right actions faster, and prove the value of every decision.

Ready to gain complete visibility into your connected device environment? Learn how Asimily’s comprehensive exposure management platform can help you discover, assess, and secure every asset on your network at asimily.com.