In today’s software-driven world, the question is no longer whether you rely on third-party code-it’s how you manage the risks that come with it. Vulnerability management has become a non-negotiable pillar of cybersecurity and compliance. From financial services to healthcare providers to cloud-native startups, identifying, assessing, and remediating security flaws isn’t just good practice-it’s mandated by regulations and industry frameworks.
The challenge is that every dependency in your application, whether direct or buried deep in the supply chain, can introduce risk. A single outdated package may carry known vulnerabilities-or worse, be end-of-life (EOL), meaning no new patches will ever be released. Running on EOL versions or entire EOL projects puts organizations in an impossible situation: the compliance requirement to remediate vulnerabilities collides with the reality that no vendor or community is providing fixes.
The Growing Importance of Vulnerability Management
Not long ago, vulnerability management was seen as an IT checkbox. Today, it’s a board-level and regulator-level concern. Major breaches tied to unpatched software have pushed regulators to set stricter expectations and timelines.
For organizations, this means two things:
- Detect vulnerabilities quickly, across all application dependencies.
- Demonstrate remediation and documentation in line with regulatory requirements.
Consider a modern Node.js or Python application. What looks like a few dozen direct dependencies may expand into hundreds of transitive components. Even if the vulnerable code lives several layers deep, it still exposes the entire application. That complexity is exactly what regulators are now expecting organizations to manage-and the risk only compounds if some of those components are no longer supported.
Vulnerability Management in Frameworks and Regulations
Around the world, compliance regimes are converging on the same principle: unpatched vulnerabilities are unacceptable.
- NIST CSF explicitly calls for ongoing vulnerability identification and response.
- ISO 27001 requires a formal, repeatable process for handling vulnerabilities as part of risk management.
- GDPR and HIPAA both expect organizations to minimize exposure to software risk when personal or health data is involved.
- SOC 2 requires demonstrable vulnerability assessments and timely remediation as evidence of secure operations.
And now, U.S. federal cloud security requirements are evolving further.
FedRAMP’s Draft Update: Raising the Bar
The recently proposed FedRAMP Baseline Revision (Draft) emphasizes more stringent controls for vulnerability remediation timelines and documentation. Under current FedRAMP requirements, high-severity issues must be fixed within 30 days. The draft expands expectations around:
- Deeper visibility into dependency chains, not just top-level software.
- Proof of remediation that accounts for both direct and inherited components.
- Automation and continuous monitoring, ensuring that vulnerabilities are discovered and addressed before they accumulate.
While prior iterations focused on infrastructure and base images, this draft reflects a broader concern: application-level dependencies are just as critical to federal compliance as operating systems or container layers. In practice, this means organizations will need to manage not only supported versions, but also confront the growing compliance risk of running on end-of-life libraries and projects where no fixes are available.
Comparing Key Standards
Both the CRA and PLD explicitly highlight the risks of unmanaged open source dependencies, signaling that regulators are directly addressing this layer of the software supply chain. By contrast, the FedRAMP draft, while not naming open source outright, makes it clear that application dependencies-including third-party and community-maintained packages-fall under its scope.
Why Compliance Is Hard in Practice
Meeting these requirements isn’t simple. Common challenges include:
- Limited visibility: Transitive dependencies are often invisible to legacy scanners.
- Prioritization fatigue: Teams are flooded with vulnerability alerts, many of which are irrelevant or low-impact.
- Upgrade friction: Patching libraries often introduces breaking changes that stall remediation.
- EOL software: Even when vulnerabilities are known, organizations may find no patches available for end-of-life versions or projects-making replacement or replatforming the only path to compliance.
- Audit overhead: Maintaining logs, evidence, and documentation creates significant burden.
Tooling mismatch: Traditional scanners weren’t built for modern package ecosystems, leaving gaps in coverage.
Compliance Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling
Achieving compliance is critical-but it should be the starting point, not the end goal. A sustainable vulnerability management strategy:
- Continuously monitors dependencies.
- Prioritizes vulnerabilities intelligently.
- Streamlines patching to minimize developer friction.
- Addresses risks from EOL versions and projects through planned replacement strategies.
- Produces audit-ready evidence automatically.
This reduces risk, improves developer efficiency, and strengthens resilience beyond the minimum requirements.
How Resolved Security Helps
Resolved Security bridges the gap between compliance mandates and day-to-day execution. Our platform automates patching across application dependencies, eliminating alert fatigue and delivering real fixes.
- Teams using Resolved remediate up to 8x more vulnerabilities without developer burnout.
- Automated evidence and attestations make FedRAMP, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 audits audit-ready by default.
- Reduced mean time to remediation (MTTR) helps organizations meet tight regulatory timelines while saving significant engineering hours.
- For end-of-life components, we help organizations plan replacements or mitigations to ensure compliance doesn’t hit a dead end.
With Resolved, vulnerability management becomes sustainable, scalable, and compliant by default.
