It's an undisputed fact that the time between vendors making vulnerability disclosures and hackers building code to exploit them is shrinking. The net gain of using a vulnerability service is that those guarding large-scale networks will spend less time to patch these holes.

Vulnerability alert services free the time for your expensive IT security staff to do the hard-core analysis necessary to keep your network protected from the latest security vulnerabilities.

These services cull the available vulnerability information outlets, aggregate the data on new security announcements and help customize how your security staff needs to be fed that information. With these services in place, security administrators readily receive relevant alerts and can spend their time addressing them.

Using a comprehensive warning system like those we tested paired with some sort of trouble-ticketing system could seriously curtail the time it takes to shore up your network against a newly announced vulnerability.