4 Proven HCL BigFix Approaches to Augment Vulnerability Management in 2025

Vulnerability and exposure management has become one of the most critical security priorities in 2025. With over 23,000 vulnerabilities published by mid-2025 (marking a 15% increase compared to the same period last year) (NVD), the challenge isn't just detection—it's comprehensive coverage and rapid, effective vulnerability remediation through prioritized, automated patch management at scale.

Yet, organizations leveraging only a single tool for vulnerability or exposure management are likely to miss potential areas of risk. Security teams face an overwhelming workload with 131 new vulnerabilities discovered every day in 2025 (Bitsight forecast via Betanews, 2025). This makes augmenting existing vulnerability management programs with continuous, layered protection essential. Identifying vulnerabilities in real time is crucial to keep up with the daily discovery rate.

This blog explores why single-tool strategies create dangerous gaps, how HCL BigFix can augment your existing vulnerability and exposure management processes, and the four distinct ways organizations can leverage HCL BigFix to close security gaps. These gaps can result in security weaknesses remaining undetected and unaddressed.

HCL BigFix helps organizations track and manage identified vulnerabilities more effectively.

Why Single-tool Vulnerability Management Creates Risk Gaps

Organizations using products such as Qualys, Tenable, and Rapid7 often discover significant blind spots in their vulnerability coverage because these solutions lack unified patch management capabilities. Relying on point solutions—tools designed to address only specific aspects of vulnerability management—can leave organizations with incomplete coverage and increased risk.. Several factors contribute to these gaps:

1. Scope of Detections

Different vulnerability management solutions may identify different scopes of vulnerabilities and are often better at certain types of detections than others. In many cases, the scope and accuracy of detection depend on the availability of credentials against target devices, leading to two critical challenges:

• Credential management complexity across thousands of endpoints and diverse infrastructure
• Missed detections (false negatives) due to missing or invalid credentials

These gaps highlight the importance of adopting a remediation-first approach supported by automated patch management. 

2. Timeliness of Data

Traditional scanners run weekly or monthly, meaning vulnerabilities remain undetected in between. This creates windows of exposure where attackers can exploit newly emerged weaknesses before remediation of vulnerabilities can take place.

3. Scope of Devices and Blind Spots

• Shadow IT: Some vulnerability management products may not be aware of all devices in your environment or may not be configured to scan them.
• Network segmentation: Devices located in segmented networks or air-gapped environments might not be accessible to network scanners.
• Agent coverage gaps: Even solutions that rely on agents suffer when those agents are not running, misconfigured, or removed.

4. False Positives and Alert Fatigue

Relying on a single vulnerability management tool means security teams are forced to treat its findings as the sole source of truth. High false positive rates lead to wasted time and alert fatigue — and with no secondary validation, real exposures may be incorrectly dismissed or simply not acted upon in time. Augmenting with HCL BigFix reduces this risk by correlating results across tools and automating remediation, ensuring critical exposures aren’t lost in the noise.

The rising urgency in 2025: Why stronger vulnerability management is critical

The cyber threat landscape in 2025 is escalating at an unprecedented pace. The data paints a clear picture of why stronger vulnerability management practices are no longer optional:

• 132 CVEs were exploited in the wild in Q1 2025 (CISA KEV Catalog).
• 131 new vulnerabilities are discovered every single day (Bitsight via Betanews, 2025).

This constant onslaught of vulnerabilities suggests that attackers have more chances, and more quickly in many cases, than organizations have the capacity to respond to or patch vulnerabilities. Organizations that rely on Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores or basic remediation processes are not focusing on addressing the most urgent vulnerabilities.

According to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), over 23,000 vulnerabilities had already been published by mid-2025—a 15% year-over-year rise compared to the same period in 2024, putting the year on track to exceed 45,000 disclosures by December 2025

There is one key takeaway:

Organizations must evolve toward smarter vulnerability management, approaches that include context, risk, automation and stronger vulnerability remediation tools capable of scaling enterprise-wide.

Choosing the Right HCL BigFix Approach for Vulnerability and Exposure Management

HCL BigFix fulfills various functions in your vulnerability and exposure management strategy, whether it is complementary to existing VM tools, part of a strategy to solve remediation faster, or functionally independent as the primary vehicle. The answer is really based on your organizational requirements and how your team approaches security and vulnerability management as a whole.

• Approach 1: Standalone HCL BigFix (No VM Tool).
  In this approach, BigFix acts as both the vulnerability detection and remediation platform for your computing devices. It is best suited for smaller organizations with limited or no network infrastructure. The simplicity of SaaS deployment and the extensive patch content coverage are the benefits of this approach. BigFix provides native vulnerability detection and remediation capabilities for endpoints, without requiring an additional VM tool. This approach does not provide coverage for network device vulnerabilities. Implementation of this approach would involve BigFix operating as the primary vulnerability management and remediation solution for all computing devices supported by automated patch management and streamlined remediation of vulnerabilities.
• Approach 2: HCL BigFix for computing devices + VM tool for network devices.
  Here, BigFix is used for the detection and remediation of vulnerabilities on computing endpoints, while a VM tool is retained exclusively for network infrastructure. This approach is ideal for cost-conscious organizations that want complete coverage without duplicating endpoint licensing costs in additional VM tools. The advantage is full visibility across both endpoints and network devices, with potential license cost savings. Implementation involves configuring BigFix for endpoint coverage while restricting the VM tool’s role to network devices only to create a unified vulnerability management tool pairing for comprehensive protection.
• Approach 3: Integrated vulnerability remediation.
  In this model, a VM product (such as Qualys, Tenable, or Rapid7) continues to provide vulnerability detection across the environment, while HCL BigFix acts as another source of vulnerability detection along with automated remediation for endpoints. This approach is best suited for organizations with mature VM practices seeking to improve effectiveness and remediation speed through comprehensive coverage automation. The key advantages are leveraging existing scanners, comprehensive coverage, automated and smarter patching, and enabling unified workflows. The limitation is that visibility remains tied to scheduled scan cycles rather than continuous real-time updates. Implementation requires leveraging HCL BigFix’s Integrated Vulnerability Remediation with the existing VM tool so that detected vulnerabilities can be quickly remediated at scale using advanced vulnerability tools that accelerate endpoint patch management.
• Approach 4: Integrated remediation + Augmentation.
  This is the most advanced model, combining VM tools for detection with HCL BigFix’s remediation plus augmentation capabilities, including continuous assessment, real-time visibility, agent health monitoring, real-world, risk-driven remediation through CyberFOCUS analytics and protection level agreements (PLAs). This strategy is designed for large enterprises seeking resilience, agility, and maximum coverage. The strengths include real-time monitoring and PLA-driven metrics, which require coordination across teams to achieve full effectiveness. Implementation involves pairing VM scanners with HCL BigFix not only for remediation but also for augmentation, ensuring ongoing visibility and health checks across endpoints.

As organizations mature into the Integrated Remediation + Augmentation model, the next frontier isn’t just automating patches — it’s understanding which risks matter most.

That’s where HCL BigFix CyberFOCUS adds a powerful intelligence layer, turning vulnerability data into actionable, risk-prioritized insight.

Advanced Analytics with CyberFOCUS: Turning Data into Effective Actions

While the four adoption approaches define how HCL BigFix fits into your vulnerability strategy, CyberFOCUS defines how effectively you act on it.

It transforms raw scanner data and endpoint insights into a prioritized, business-aligned remediation roadmap, helping teams focus on what truly reduces risk and improving the organization's overall security posture.

• Vulnerability Remediation Simulator for impact assessment and testing
• CISA KEV Analyzer for prioritizing known exploited vulnerabilities (CISA KEV Catalog)
• MITRE Advanced Persistent Threat Group (APT) Analyzer to understand and manage risks associated with real-world attackers
• Protection Level Agreements (PLAs) for business-aligned security reporting
• Risk-based prioritization that focuses resources on the most critical exposures

These analytics capabilities help security teams move from reactive patching to proactive exposure management - but technology is only one piece. To stay resilient, organizations must also prepare for the future of vulnerability and exposure management in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

The differences are clear: while single-tool vulnerability management is limited by scans, manual patching, and blind spots, augmenting with HCL BigFix delivers continuous visibility, automation, and coverage. The next question is: how do organizations ensure this advantage scales as the threat landscape continues to evolve?

Future-proofing Your Exposure Management Strategy

Evolving Threat Landscape

Looking ahead, modern organizations face expanding attack surfaces that demand not just stronger tools, but future-proof exposure management strategies. Cloud adoption, remote work, and even AI-driven attacks are reshaping how vulnerabilities must be managed. This makes strengthening security and vulnerability management practices more critical than ever. 

• Hybrid cloud adoption is creating infrastructure complexity
• Remote work infrastructure expanding the security perimeter
• AI-assisted attacks that identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster than traditional methods

From Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management

The industry is moving to Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), a more comprehensive approach towards assessing risk for an organization. Organizations using complete exposure management efforts have demonstrated stronger security outcomes than those using the traditional point-in-time vulnerability scanning approach.

HCL BigFix owns this evolution by providing context-aware, continuous visibility, automated remediation and enforcement, and business-aligned reporting to overcome exposures across the attack surface. Continuously monitoring the organization's attack surface is essential to identify and remediate exposures, ensuring a proactive cybersecurity posture.

The Business Case for Augmented Vulnerability Management

Measurable Risk Reduction: From Metrics to Meaning

Organizations implementing augmented vulnerability and exposure management with HCL BigFix realize measurable improvements across key performance indicators that define both operational efficiency and security outcomes:

• MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) - Enhanced through continuous, agent-based assessment.
  BigFix provides real-time endpoint visibility, reducing reliance on periodic scans and shortening the detection window.
• MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate) - Accelerated through smart, automated patching and integrated workflows.
  With built-in automation, remediation time compresses from days or weeks to minutes or hours.
• Coverage Percentage - Improved through unified, multi-tool visibility.
  The platform leverages 500,000+ prebuilt Fixlets plus content for 100+ OS versions and 500+ third-party applications—ensuring broad, consistent patch and remediation coverage for managed devices.
• PLA Compliance (Protection Level Agreements) - Achieved through business-aligned protection metrics.
  HCL BigFix SaaS Remediate enables organizations to monitor and report adherence to Protection Level Agreements (PLAs) — measurable targets jointly defined across IT, Security, and Risk teams. These PLAs serve as benchmarks for operational effectiveness, ensuring remediation activities align with business-defined protection levels and acceptable exposure thresholds.

These metrics represent more than performance indicators - they are tangible proof points that show how automation, visibility, and analytics translate into reduced organizational risk.

ROI Drivers

Traditional vulnerability management workflows are slow, manual, and resource-intensive.

Organizations implementing HCL BigFix SaaS Remediate convert these operational inefficiencies into measurable ROI through:

• Dramatically reduced Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) with smart and effective automated patching, leveraging patch management solutions that automate and streamline the patching process
• Improved coverage by closing blind spots across endpoints and remediating vulnerabilities to reduce risk
• Lower operational overhead through SaaS and by eliminating manual remediation tasks
• License cost optimization when pairing BigFix with VM tools (Approach 2 scenario)

Collectively, these outcomes drive a stronger security posture and clear financial returns - less time spent, less risk carried, and less cost absorbed.

Deployment Benefits

Beyond measurable ROI, HCL BigFix SaaS Remediate is designed for rapid, low-friction adoption — ensuring organizations realize benefits almost immediately:

• Zero infrastructure setup - Immediate value through SaaS delivery
• Automatic updates - No maintenance burden on internal teams
• Cloud native integration with existing security tools and workflows - Smooth adoption with minimal disruption
• Scalability from hundreds to thousands of endpoints

Together, these deployment benefits shorten the time-to-value, allowing organizations to achieve measurable risk reduction and ROI faster - without operational disruption.

Why Augmented Vulnerability Management is a Business Imperative

Fast-forward to 2025, and the stakes are even higher: cybercrime is projected to reach $10.5 trillion globally and volumes of vulnerable technologies are increasing. Increasingly, one-tool approaches are no longer viable - the risk of blind spots, delayed remediations, and unmanaged exposures is too great. 

HCL BigFix provides a flexible, future-ready foundation that aligns with business priorities:

• Close critical visibility gaps that single-tool deployments leave behind.
• Accelerate remediation through the industry’s broadest remediation library.
• Continuously validate coverage with agent deployment alongside health monitoring and enforcement.
• Prioritize risk intelligently with analytics and Protection Level Agreements (PLAs).

The result is not just stronger security hygiene, but a resilient operating model that adapts to evolving threats while maximizing the value of your existing security investments.

Conclusion

In today’s fast-moving threat landscape, visibility alone is not enough. Organizations relying on standalone tools for vulnerability or exposure management often struggle not only with limited coverage but with slow, fragmented remediation that leaves them exposed far longer than necessary and unable to maintain an effective security and vulnerability management posture. Continuous vulnerability management is essential for maintaining a strong security posture, enabling organizations to proactively discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities as they emerge

Rather than replacing existing investments, HCL BigFix SaaS Remediate offers four flexible adoption paths that strengthen your program based on organizational size, maturity, and existing tools, serving as a comprehensive vulnerability management solution for managing vulnerabilities across your environment.  while supporting modern vulnerability remediation and automated patch management workflows.

Across all approaches, HCL BigFix delivers:

• Continuous assessment that complements traditional scanners and maintains real-time endpoint awareness to streamline remediation of vulnerabilities across environments and identify both known and potential vulnerabilities.
• Automated remediation powered by the industry’s most comprehensive patch content library.
• Agent deployment with ongoing health monitoring and enforcement, ensuring consistent coverage across every managed endpoint.
• Advanced analytics that enable risk-based prioritization and PLA-driven reporting to demonstrate operational effectiveness and support more accurate vulnerability management decision-making.

As vulnerabilities grow faster than teams can manually respond, the real challenge isn’t just finding weaknesses — it’s fixing them efficiently and proving results through integrated vulnerability remediation tools capable of operating at enterprise scale.

HCL BigFix SaaS Remediate bridges that gap, helping organizations scale from basic remediation to a comprehensive, resilient exposure management program.

The choice is clear: stay reactive with fragmented tools, or move to a unified, proactive model that delivers measurable, risk-aligned remediation at enterprise scale with HCL BigFix SaaS Remediate as the foundation of your vulnerability management system.

Next Step: Book a BigFix Demo

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. How does HCL BigFix find vulnerabilities that my current scanner missed?

HCL BigFix uses continuous, agent-based assessment rather than scheduled point-in-time scanning. This approach can eliminate visibility gaps that occur between scan cycles and provide more comprehensive credential-based detection. As demonstrated in real deployments, organizations often discover thousands of additional vulnerabilities when augmenting their existing VM programs with BigFix's continuous monitoring capabilities, coupled with its extensive content library and remediation of vulnerabilities powered by SaaS remediate.

3. What makes HCL BigFix's patch library "the broadest in the industry"?

BigFix maintains the most comprehensive remediation and patch library of 500k+ out-of-the-box automations, covering not just operating systems but thousands of third-party applications, security tools, and specialized software. This breadth enables automated remediation for vulnerabilities detected by any scanner, eliminating the manual processes that slow traditional patch management. The library is continuously updated as patch vendors release new updates and to address new vulnerabilities as they're discovered.

4. How does HCL BigFix handle agent health for other vendors' tools?

BigFix can install, monitor, and maintain agents from other vulnerability management vendors, ensuring consistent coverage across your entire security stack. This unique capability prevents the blind spots when VM agents may be missing from endpoints, become unhealthy, misconfigured, or removed. BigFix acts as an "agent health manager" for your entire vulnerability management ecosystem.

5. What's the ROI of augmenting my existing VM program with HCL BigFix?

Organizations see ROI through multiple dimensions: dramatically reduced Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) through automation, improved coverage eliminating blind spots, reduced operational overhead from manual processes, and measurable risk reduction through Protection Level Agreements. Given that cybercrime costs are projected to hit $15.6 trillion globally by 2029, the investment in comprehensive vulnerability and exposure management delivers clear business value through reduced risk exposure.