Steps to TruRisk™ – 5: Eliminate Risk and Lead with Confidence

Anthony Williams, Subject Matter Expert, VMDR, Qualys

September 26, 2025- 7 min read

Table of Contents

• Real-World Impact: From Measurement to Action
• Connecting the Five Steps to TruRisk
• Closing the Unpatchable Gap with TruRisk Eliminate
• Custom and Battle-tested Eliminations
• Measure with Precision, Communicate with Impact, Eliminate with Purpose

"We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire… Give us the tools and we will finish the job." - Winston Churchill

Every security team knows this truth: you can't patch everything, and you can't necessarily protect everything. Perfection is rare, but decisive execution can change outcomes. With the right team and tooling, risk management can shift rapidly from reporting into trackable, meaningful action.

The mission is simple: continually de-risk the organization. The challenge? Too many teams stall after measuring and communicating cyber risk, stopping short of that final action. What comes next is where impact is made: Are teams actively reducing risk, or just tracking it?

Well-prioritized patching delivers immediate, measurable gains. Yet not every risk can be patched. To finish the job, teams must move beyond dashboards and reports, stop chasing noise, and focus on innovative approaches to eliminating vulnerabilities that truly impact the business.

Real-World Impact: From Measurement to Action

A global enterprise faced a familiar challenge:

• Security teams drowning in data

• Thousands of critical vulnerabilities flagged every month

• Patching teams unable to keep up

Despite countless conversations and new investments, the attack surface kept expanding, and trends moved in the wrong direction. The turning point came when leadership realized that adding more people and tools wasn't solving the problem. Critical vulnerabilities still went unaddressed for months, even on the assets that everyone knew mattered most to the business. The organization could no longer afford to measure risk without eliminating it.

From Data to Outcome-Driven Results

This realization triggered a rapid shift into automated remediation, implementing Qualys Patch Management, and real-time tracking aligned to business units. The focus shifted to asset inventory, patching ownership, and orchestrated workflows. For the first time, Security and IT were operating in lockstep, guided by shared risk signals and defined ownership.

The Result:

• Mean time to remediate critical vulnerabilities dropped by almost 70%

• TruRisk™ scores visibly reduced across high-impact business units

• Internet-facing asset visibility increased by more than 300%

• For the first time: Leadership gained real-time visibility into progress and effectiveness

Best of all, the team stopped chasing metrics and started executing, seeing the impact of rapid risk reduction-action across the entire global enterprise. This transformation not only strengthened their security posture but also contributed to significant cost savings, including reductions in cyber insurance premiums.

History and cybersecurity alike are filled with examples of overwhelming challenges met through clear mission goals, innovation, collaboration, and decisive execution. Resilience can't be measured by alerts, dashboards, or vulnerability counts alone. Modern teams must be focused, while blending insight, strategy, and timely action to reduce risk and successfully outmaneuver threats.

Connecting the Five Steps to TruRisk™ 

Digital signals should always reveal decisive moves, making business risk something that's eliminated, not just tracked. As we've shown throughout this series, chasing volume metrics and gaps without context drains time, energy, and resources.

• Step 1: Shift to Priority - Leading the shift to risk-based prioritization means fostering collaboration and a shared language across the organization. Risk (TruRisk) = Likelihood (QDS) x Impact (ACS)

• Step 2: Measure - Accurately identify asset and threat likelihood. Asset context (ACS) combined with threat intelligence (QDS) is key.

• Step 3: Get Started - Focus on High-Impact Risks: Prioritize remediation efforts on the highest potential business impact. When teams know what makes the cash register ring, it's clear where efforts start.

• Step 4: Communicate - Tracking and conveying cyber risk in business terms builds trust, aligns teams, and secures resources. In the end, it's the gap between confident execution and assumed results.

Now, in Step 5: Eliminate, it all comes together. Execution is the capstone of a broader risk-based approach: Measurement, intelligence, prioritization, and communication become decisive actions that rapidly reduce risk to the business.

With the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk™ Platform, that final step is much clearer.

Closing the Unpatchable Gap with TruRisk™ Eliminate

Mitigate, Isolate and Remediate

Closing the Unpatchable Gap with TruRisk™ Eliminate, means teams no longer have to choose between waiting on a patch and living with exposure. TruRisk™ Eliminate helps organizations reduce risk through Patching, Mitigation, Isolation, and advanced Remediation strategies. With built-in automation and full control over impact, uptime, and business cycles, TruRisk ™ Eliminate accelerates remediation, strengthens overall security posture, and addresses those unpatchable gaps.

Mitigate, Isolate, Patch and Remediate options, fed directly from VMDR, let defenders apply the right fix at the right time.

• Windows, Linux, and Mac OS patching

• Third-party application patching

• Vulnerabilities without an available Patch

• Vulnerabilities where Patches cannot be deployed

Mitigate enables teams to apply risk controls and configuration changes to address threats, particularly for unpatchable vulnerabilities, or situations where patching carries operational risk.

Isolate provides a proactive way to quarantine risky assets and prevent exploitation, offering an alternative to reactive EDR approaches. It isolates devices from the network while still enabling remote patching.

• Integrated with VMDR, vulnerabilities get marked as Mitigated("Isolated") and will reduce the associated Qualys Detection Score

• Also, supports exceptions for trusted applications and destinations (Windows or Linux), ensuring isolated assets remain connected to essential resources

See TruRisk™ Eliminate Blog: needrestart, WinVerifyTrust, and LPE

Together, these capabilities give security teams a unified, risk-focused approach, eliminating threats where possible, mitigating when patching isn't an option, isolating to prevent compromise and even remediating with custom fixes if necessary.

Custom and Battle-tested Eliminations

Every Qualys Cloud Agent can run custom or platform-approved scripts via Qualys Custom Assessment and Remediation (CAR). We also offer various out of the box, curated, scripts for remediations, that go above and beyond simple patching use cases.

• Build custom detections and automate compliance:

CAR adds flexibility, with curated or custom actions, streamlining workflows, and strengthening overall security posture.

• Manage and patch Java and be ready for the next Log4Shell event:

With Qualys TruRisk ™ Eliminate, teams unlock confident execution, enabling faster, trackable risk reduction. Thanks to the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk™ Platform, digital defenders now have a different feel for that final action.

Explore how the TruRisk™ platform helps organizations to reduce cyber risk across the extended enterprise.

Measure with Precision, Communicate with Impact, Eliminate with Purpose

"United we fought and united we prevail" - Chester Nimitz, US Chief Commander, WWII Pacific Front

Throughout history, victory has gone to those willing to change their approach. Inspired leadership, intentional collaboration, relentless innovation, and a refusal to accept the status quo, are all common threads.

Ford's assembly line revolutionized production by rethinking the process entirely. Washington's spies didn't just collect intelligence; they turned it into coordinated, mission-aligned action, tactics essential to defeating a seasoned opponent.

Sharing tactics, resources, and intelligence have resulted in victories that prove that trust and prioritization can outmatch a well-equipped adversary. Prioritized workflows enable leaders to focus efforts and execute decisive strikes. As we look back at history, this discipline was key, when outnumbered… and out resourced.

Victory doesn't come from more data or more effort, but from disciplined workflows that prioritize, coordinate, and execute with precision. Maps, trends, dashboards, and reports alone will never close the gap; only decisive, data-driven action will.

The Steps to TruRisk™ series applies these same principles to cybersecurity.

• Measuring with speed, precision, and priority

• Communicating with impact, intelligence, and context

• Eliminating with confidence, purpose, and authority, knowing the team has all they need to finish the job!

When teams gain clarity on the right threats and their true impact, the path forward becomes clear. With prioritized planning, coordinated execution, and relentless persistence, one can eliminate cyber risk.

It's time to lead the shift, turn the tide, and finish the mission with Qualys TruRisk™.

See what eliminating risk looks like in practice. Join the conversation and turn strategy into confident execution.

Ready to put the insights to work? Start your Free Trial for TruRisk Eliminate!

Our contributors

• Marcus Burrows, Lead Technical Trainer

• Lavish Jhamb, Senior PM, Compliance Solutions

• Eran Livne, Senior Director, Endpoint Remediation

Anthony Williams, Subject Matter Expert, VMDR, Qualys

Automated Remediation, Risk Reduction, Risk-based Vulnerability Management, Steps to TruRisk, TruRisk Eliminate

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