As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, the European Union’s NIS2 Directive is pushing important, essential entities to adopt stricter cybersecurity measures. For organizations in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, energy, and digital infrastructure, NIS2 is more than just a regulatory challenge—it’s an opportunity to strengthen operational resilience and proactively manage cyber risks.
So, how do organizations navigate these new regulatory requirements? To achieve full NIS2 compliance, businesses need to focus on vulnerability management, IT visibility, and incident prevention. Let’s start by understanding what NIS2 means for your organization and how to prevent incidents from occurring in the first place.
What is the NIS2 Directive?
The NIS2 Directive (EU 2022/2555) aims to increase the level of cybersecurity across the European Union by improving the resilience of critical services. The directive applies to a wide range of sectors, from transportation to financial services, that are deemed essential for the economy and society.
Key NIS2 obligations include:
- Risk management: Organizations must take proactive measures to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks.
- Incident reporting: In the event of a significant incident, affected organizations must notify authorities within 24 hours, with further updates required within 72 hours.
The challenge for most organizations is ensuring they can meet these requirements by preventing incidents before they occur.
Keeping up with evolving cyber threats
Let’s look at the core challenges facing organizations under NIS2:
- Increasing complexity of cyber threats: From ransomware attacks to zero-day vulnerabilities, the number and sophistication of cyber threats are growing. Organizations need solutions to detect, prioritize, and address these vulnerabilities in real time.
- Fragmented IT environments: With multi-cloud infrastructures and legacy systems, many organizations struggle to gain visibility into their entire IT landscape. This makes it difficult to track software vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with NIS2.
- Proactive risk management: NIS2 places a strong emphasis on risk prevention. The focus is not just on responding to incidents, but on preventing them altogether. This requires a proactive approach to vulnerability and patch management.
How Flexera helps you proactively manage cyber risk
Flexera’s Software Vulnerability Management (SVM) solution is designed to address these challenges head-on. By focusing on incident prevention rather than just post-incident reporting, Flexera helps you avoid triggering NIS2’s 24-72 hour incident reporting window. Here’s how:
- Real-time vulnerability detection: SVM provides continuous scanning of your IT environment, identifying vulnerabilities in both on-premises and cloud applications. This allows you to detect risks as soon as they emerge, ensuring you can act quickly to mitigate potential threats.
- Automated patch management: One of the biggest challenges in managing cybersecurity risks is the timely deployment of patches. Flexera automates this process, ensuring that critical vulnerabilities are patched without delay, reducing the risk of operational disruptions or security breaches.
- Prioritizing based on risk: Not all vulnerabilities are equal. SVM uses risk-based prioritization to focus your resources on the most critical vulnerabilities first, helping you address the issues that pose the greatest threat to your organization. By addressing vulnerabilities early, Flexera helps you prevent incidents that could lead to severe operational disruptions or financial losses—key factors in NIS2 compliance.
Broader impact: IT visibility and operational resilience
While SVM is crucial for vulnerability management, NIS2 compliance goes beyond just patching software vulnerabilities. Organizations need full visibility across their IT infrastructure to ensure they meet the directive’s risk management requirements. This is where Flexera One and IT Visibility come into play.
Flexera One provides organizations comprehensive IT asset management with a unified view of all their IT assets—whether in the cloud or on-premises. By offering deep insights into asset utilization, security vulnerabilities, and compliance risks, Flexera One helps you manage your entire IT landscape more efficiently, ensuring that no critical area is left exposed.
Flexera One IT Visibility ensures that organizations have a clear map of their entire infrastructure. By identifying critical dependencies and areas at risk, IT Visibility helps ensure that your security and compliance efforts are focused where they matter most. This is essential for meeting NIS2’s broader risk management obligations.
Build a proactive approach to NIS2
NIS2 places a significant emphasis on preventing incidents through proactive cybersecurity measures. With Flexera’s suite of solutions—including Software Vulnerability Management, Flexera One, and IT Visibility—organizations can:
- Identify and address vulnerabilities before they become significant incidents.
- Automate patching to ensure timely remediation and reduce the window of exposure.
- Gain full visibility into their IT landscape, ensuring they meet NIS2’s risk management and operational resilience requirements.
Stay tuned to learn more on how organizations can manage incident reporting, ensure operational resilience, and align with NIS2’s long-term compliance goals.
Interested in learning how Flexera can help your organization meet NIS2 requirements? Contact us for a demo today.