Proactive Risk Reduction: Vulnerability Management Program for a Leading Global Watchmaker

Client Profile

A leading international watch manufacturer, this client designs, produces, and sells premium timepieces across multiple countries, with manufacturing plants, distribution hubs, and sales channels spread worldwide. Its operations span factory floors, regional warehouses, retail boutiques, and e-commerce platforms—creating a complex, interconnected IT ecosystem. Treating cybersecurity as a core business enabler, the company engaged our team to design and run a robust vulnerability management program that safeguards brand equity, customer data, and uninterrupted production.

Challenge

Operating at global scale exposed the organization to a fast-moving threat landscape and several persistent hurdles:

• Governing an ever-growing asset estate across factory networks on premises, and multi-cloud.

• Detecting and remediating vulnerabilities quickly and in the right order of risk.

• Hitting internal security KPIs while aligning with NIST CSF and ISO 27001 controls.

• Providing executives with clear, actionable visibility into cyber risk.

• Minimizing exposure to issues that could disrupt production or erode customer trust.

The company needed more than ad-hoc scanning—it required a continuous, data-driven vulnerability lifecycle management.

Our Approach

We built a tailored Vulnerability Management program on five pillars:

1) Asset Discovery & Classification

• Performed comprehensive discovery across corporate and manufacturing segments to enumerate live hosts and services.

• Classified assets by criticality, business function, and data sensitivity to drive prioritization.

• Federated inventory with the CMDB and scanning platform to ensure a single source of truth.

2) Vulnerability Scanning

• Deployed lightweight agents from leading technology providers for daily assessments and authenticated checks.

• Tuned scan profiles to cover OS, configuration baselines, and third-party software exposure.

• Scheduled factory and OT-adjacent scans during maintenance windows to avoid operational impact.

3) Risk-Based Prioritization

• Combined CVSS, vendor risk scoring, exploit intelligence, and asset criticality into contextual risk ratings.

• Delivered and maintained role-based dashboards highlighting aging items, SLA breaches, and top exposure themes for IT and Security.

4) Remediation & Verification

• Partnered with business platform owners to execute patches and secure configuration changes within change-control cycles.

• Verified closure via targeted re-scans and manual validation on safety- or revenue-critical systems.

• Escalated overdue critical items to the monthly security steering committee for decision and funding.

5) Executive Reporting & Continuous Improvement

• Published monthly risk posture reports with KPIs, trends, and remediation effectiveness.

• Captured recurring misconfigurations to update hardening baselines and golden images.

• Ran quarterly reviews to expand coverage, retire legacy tech, and optimize scan performance results.

Engagement Outcomes

Significant Reduction in Critical Vulnerabilities

Achieved more than 50% decrease in critical and high-risk findings within the first six months.

Improved Visibility & Accountability

Centralized, near real-time dashboards provided a single view across all business units and regions.

Executives received concise, outcome-oriented metrics to guide risk decisions and investments.

Operational Efficiency

Aligned remediation with patch windows and change-control, avoiding production downtime.

Reduced repeat findings through root-cause analysis and preventive controls.

Security Maturity Advancement

Embedded vulnerability management into enterprise risk and compliance processes.

Demonstrated strong alignment with ISO 27001 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

Conclusion & Business Impact

By shifting from reactive fixes to proactive, risk-prioritized remediation, the organization measurably shrank its attack surface without disrupting core operations. The program elevated confidence in the company’s security posture, strengthened compliance alignment, and established a repeatable engine for continuous improvement—delivering cybersecurity outcomes that are both technically rigorous and tightly coupled to business value.