Know what's exposed. Fix what matters. Prove both.
Vulnerability Management at Fortellar is a program, not a scan. We assess the environment, test it the way an attacker would, and govern the data underneath it.
A scan report is not a program.
Nearly every mid-market security team can produce a vulnerability report. Far fewer can answer the questions that follow it: which of these actually matter here, who owns the fix, when will it close, and how do you know it stayed closed. That gap is where audit findings, failed customer security reviews, and repeat incidents come from.
This practice closes it in three moves. Assess the environment and rebuild the process that manages it. Test the controls adversarially, so the risk is demonstrated rather than asserted. Govern the data those controls protect, so exposure is measured against what the data is actually worth. One practice, one evidence base, one owner.
Three services: Assess, Test, Govern.
Most clients enter at assessment when an auditor or a customer asks the question, add adversarial testing once the basics hold, and bring in data protection when the exposure conversation turns into a data conversation.
Vulnerability Assessment & Program Uplift
A full read of the environment and the process that manages it. Not a scan-and-report: you keep the prioritization model, the ownership map, and the cadence that closes findings after we hand off.
- Estate-wide assessment with business-context prioritization
- Remediation ownership, SLAs, and reporting cadence
- A program the team can run without us
Penetration Testing & Red Team
Scoped, time-limited adversarial testing against the environment as it runs. Clear rules of engagement, evidence for every finding, and a report your auditor, your customer, and your engineers can each use.
- External, internal, application, and social engineering scopes
- Attack-path narrative, not a tool dump
- Retest included, so closure is proven
Data Protection & Governance
Classification, ownership, retention, and DLP scoping across the environments your data actually lives in. Exposure gets measured against what the data is worth, not just where the vulnerability sits.
- Data inventory, classification, and owner assignment
- Retention and handling requirements written to your obligations
- DLP scoped to real flows, not default policies
Four moments bring people here. Each one has a different first step.
You don't need to know which service you need. Find the sentence that sounds like your week, and start there.
A customer or prospect is holding up the deal
“They sent a security questionnaire and asked for a pen test report. We don't have one.”
Revenue, on a clock. The security review is now part of procurement, and an unanswered question reads as an unmanaged risk. What's needed is defensible evidence, fast, not a twelve-month program.
An audit window is open and the findings won't close
“We scan every month. The same criticals are still on the list from last quarter.”
A repeat finding is worse than a new one. It tells the auditor the process, not the patch, is broken. Prioritization and ownership are the actual gap.
A new rule or enforcement cycle just landed
“Our regulator updated the requirements and we don't know what's in scope anymore.”
Scope is the exposure. Without a current data inventory and classification, you can't say which systems the rule reaches, which means you can't evidence compliance with it.
The company grew and the controls didn't
“Three acquisitions, two clouds, and one spreadsheet tracking all of it.”
Coverage gaps hide in the seams: unmanaged assets, inherited tooling, and no single owner. Growth multiplies the exposure faster than the process scales.
Converts to Managed Security when steady-state begins.
Six things every engagement in this practice does.
Whichever service you start with, the operating discipline is the same. It's the reason the findings close and stay closed.
Asset and data inventory first
You cannot manage exposure on an environment you can't enumerate. Every engagement starts by establishing what exists, who owns it, and what data it holds.
Prioritization in business context
Severity scores are an input, not an answer. Findings are ranked against exploitability, exposure, and what the affected system means to the business.
Named ownership and SLAs
Every finding leaves with an owner, a remediation path, and a closure date. Unowned findings are the reason lists never shrink.
Evidence built as you go
Testing, remediation, and closure are documented in the form auditors and enterprise customers already accept. No evidence scramble later.
Retest, not self-report
Closure is verified by the people who found the issue. A finding is closed when it has been re-tested, not when a ticket was moved.
A handoff that holds
The program is written down and the team is trained on it. If you'd rather not run it, Managed Security picks it up on the same evidence base.
What we test against, and where we test it.
The standards the findings are mapped to
Findings are cross-mapped to the frameworks you already report against, so one round of remediation answers several audits.
The estate we cover
Testing and inventory reach the environments the mid-market actually runs, including the ones inherited through acquisition.
The expertise behind this practice.
Security Engineering & Architecture
The architectural read behind every finding: whether the defensive backbone is built on modern principles like Zero Trust, and whether the control would hold against a real adversary rather than an audit line item.
See expertiseGRC Program Design
Findings are cross-mapped to the frameworks you carry, so remediation produces audit evidence as a by-product. Built by former auditors and GRC leaders who know what fieldwork actually asks for.
See expertiseIdentity & Access Management
Most attack paths run through identity. Joiner-mover-leaver, privileged access, and access certification are read as part of the exposure picture, not a separate project.
See expertiseCloud Security & Governance
AWS and Azure workload posture, landing-zone design, and the guardrails that keep new resources from re-introducing the exposure you just remediated.
See expertiseBring us the questionnaire, the audit finding, or the scan you can't get through.
We'll tell you which of the three services you actually need, what it would take, and where you're already covered.