How Often Should You Perform Vulnerability Scans?

TL;DR

How often you scan for vulnerabilities really depends on how fast your environment changes. For cloud infrastructure and internet-facing assets, scanning should happen continuously or daily. Critical systems on-premises usually need weekly scans, while stable internal networks can get by with monthly checks. Scanning only quarterly can leave you exposed for 45 to 90 days. That's risky because attackers often exploit vulnerabilities within just 7 to 14 days after they're made public. Since the average time to remediate critical vulnerabilities is around 74 days, waiting three months between scans adds about 45 days before you even start to detect issues. This means your total exposure could stretch past 119 days, giving attackers plenty of time to act without being noticed.

Key Takeaways

• 768 CVEs were exploited in the wild in 2024 with weaponization happening within 7-14 days of disclosure, while quarterly scanning creates 45-90 day blind spots before detection.
• Cloud environments require continuous or daily scanning with infrastructure changes in minutes through IaC and auto-scaling, making traditional weekly/monthly schedules dangerously obsolete 32% of cloud assets sit unmonitored without continuous discovery.
• You can't scan what you don't know exists, and asset discovery must run more frequently than vulnerability scans.
• The average MTTR of 74 days assumes immediate discovery with quarterly scans add 45 days before vulnerabilities are detected, extending total exposure windows to 119+ days 92% of enterprises now use multi-cloud strategies—expanding attack surfaces by 22.6% annually and requiring continuous monitoring to track resources provisioned in seconds

Introduction

Your security team follows a routine. You run vulnerability scans every quarter—in January, April, July, and October. It's the same schedule, year after year. Scan, report, ticket, and then repeat.

But what happens in between?

Just last Tuesday, your cloud team spun up 47 new EC2 instances for a product release. By Wednesday morning, a critical RCE vulnerability was announced, with working exploits already available on GitHub.

Your next scan? It's still 38 days away. Attackers don't stick to your calendar. They're scanning your networks right now, spotting those new assets and moving quickly—often getting in long before your next scan runs.

Research from Edgescan showed 768 CVEs were actively exploited in 2024, which is up 20 percent from 2023. For critical vulnerabilities, the time between public disclosure and active exploitation has dropped from weeks to just hours.

Meanwhile, the average time to remediate a critical vulnerability is 74 days and that's after you've detected it. When you factor in quarterly scanning, you're probably leaving your systems exposed for about four months, while attackers only need a week or two to take advantage.

How Often Should a Company Assess Its Attack Surface for New Vulnerabilities?

Scan frequency must match the infrastructure speed

Quarterly scans are outdated for modern cloud environments. Cloud resources can be provisioned in minutes, containers and serverless workloads may exist for just minutes. Developers often leave test environments running, creating "shadow IT" blind spots.

Daily or continuous assessment for cloud and internet-facing assets

New resources can be exposed and exploited within 24 hours. Attackers can scan the entire IPv4 internet in under 24 hours using tools like Masscan or ZMap, while platforms like Shodan provide pre-indexed results instantly.

Critical on-premises systems

Firewalls, VPNs, web apps, and email gateways should be scanned weekly. Event-triggered scans should follow any configuration change, patch deployment, or security incident.

Internal, stable networks

Can be scanned less frequently, but quarterly scans are insufficient. Studies show 79% of cyber risks come from outside the internal IT perimeter.

Event-triggered scans are essential

After new deployments or configuration changes. When new CVEs are published affecting your stack. Following M&A or subsidiary integration. After security incidents or near-miss events. When threat intelligence indicates active targeting of your industry.

How Often Should Organizations Repeat the Vulnerability Management Lifecycle to Stay Secure?

Many teams ask, "How often should we run through the vulnerability management process?" The truth is, there's no one-size-fits-all answer. Each part—finding vulnerabilities, figuring out what's most important, fixing them, checking if the fix worked, and then reporting on it—happens on its own timeline. Trying to stick to one rigid schedule just doesn't cut it anymore.

• Asset discovery must be continuous in cloud environments. New servers, containers, and services can pop up in seconds. If you don't know they're there, you can't protect them. On-premises systems change more slowly, but rogue devices, BYOD endpoints, and configuration drift still occur frequently enough that weekly discovery is the minimum acceptable frequency. A good rule of thumb: find things more often than you scan them.
• Risk prioritization must happen immediately after discovery. Waiting days to decide what to fix just increases your risk. Automated tools are helpful, but really important vulnerabilities still need a person to look at them within hours. Something that seems like a "medium" problem today could become critical tomorrow if attackers start using it.
• Remediation should follow risk-based SLAs, not arbitrary calendar schedules. Critical vulnerabilities that are exposed to the internet should be fixed in a day or two. High-severity issues get weeks, not months. Far too often, teams take longer than they should, and that quietly leaves doors open for attackers. Verification—confirming remediation effectiveness—is where many teams fail. Just patching something isn't enough; you have to confirm that the fix did its job. Quick follow-up scans catch mistakes. They also stop the same problems from popping up again.
• Reporting moves more slowly, and that's usually fine. Security teams need weekly dashboards to keep tabs on what's happening day-to-day. Managers want to see monthly trends, and boards are interested in quarterly updates.
• Quarterly scans alone just don't cut it anymore. By the time the scan runs, attackers may already have had weeks to exploit vulnerabilities. The modern approach is continuous discovery in the cloud, daily or weekly scans for critical systems, and scans triggered whenever changes happen. Waiting three months is simply too long.

How Often Should Asset Discovery Scans Be Performed to Ensure Up-to-Date Inventories?

You cannot secure what you cannot see—a fundamental principle of cybersecurity asset management. Finding all your assets is actually more crucial than just scanning for vulnerabilities. When assets are unknown, attackers find those blind spots easily.

Cloud Environments

In cloud environments, inventories get outdated incredibly fast. New servers, containers, and serverless functions pop up and disappear all the time, often automatically. Developers might spin up test environments and then forget to shut them down. Research shows 32% of cloud assets remain unmonitored without continuous discovery—creating blind spots where threats operate undetected. One financial company, for example, found 1,000 cloud storage buckets that were misconfigured. They found these in just a few hours, something monthly scans would have completely missed.

On-Premises Environments

For on-premises setups, devices like personal phones, IoT gadgets, operational technology, and contractor equipment are always connecting, often without IT even knowing. When rogue or forgotten devices aren't discovered regularly, they become easy entry points for attackers.

SaaS and Application Assets

When it comes to SaaS and applications, "shadow IT" and unapproved integrations mean new assets are created constantly. Forgotten subdomains, staging areas, and APIs definitely add to the risk. In fact, 38% of successful attacks in 2019 were linked to shadow IT or misconfigurations.

Discovery Best Practices

Best practice: Asset discovery frequency should equal or exceed vulnerability scan frequency plus one level—if you scan weekly, discover daily; if you scan daily, discover continuously. Continuous discovery in the cloud should feed into your daily vulnerability scans. Then, weekly comprehensive scans can cover everything else. For on-prem and hybrid networks, aim for daily discovery of cloud and internet-facing assets, and weekly for internal networks. Monthly discovery is really only okay for environments that are super stable and don't change much.

Event-Triggered Discovery

Event-triggered discovery provides additional coverage beyond scheduled scans. Think about running scans after migrations, acquisitions, security incidents, or when you see unusual activity. It's a good idea to connect this to your vulnerability management system. That way, new assets get scanned right away, and any assets that are no longer in use get removed.

Scaling Asset Discovery

At scale, modern attack surface management platforms provide continuous discovery for cloud and SaaS environments, real-time change detection, and automated workflows that enable security teams to address exposures in minutes rather than hours. They also give you real-time alerts and detect changes as they happen. Automated workflows allow security teams to focus on new risks and deal with exposures in minutes, not hours.

Building a Modern Continuous Scanning Strategy

Organizations must shift from periodic to continuous vulnerability scanning—treating security as ongoing validation rather than quarterly audits. Security practices that run scans only once a month or quarter create extended periods of time when systems remain unmonitored. Security practices today require validation to occur continuously because security professionals now view it as an ongoing process rather than an infrequent check.

Determining Scan Frequency

Determining optimal scan frequency starts with assessing your environment's change velocity, cloud-to-on-premises ratio, regulatory requirements, and risk tolerance.

The deployment speed of your organization should align with your current cloud and on-prem systems distribution, and your organization needs to follow all applicable regulations while understanding your risk level and available resources. High-change, cloud-heavy environments need continuous or daily scans.

Organizations operating with moderate-change hybrid environments need to perform security scans at least once a day through to once a week. The scanning process for low-change on-prem systems should occur either once a week or once every two weeks.

Most organizations that run quarterly scans for compliance purposes fulfill their regulatory requirements, yet these scans fail to detect attackers who exploit system vulnerabilities during extended periods of time.

Balancing Frequency and Impact

Effective scanning strategies balance security coverage with operational impact—network bandwidth, system performance, and alert volume. The process of running scans multiple times will consume network resources while putting pressure on system infrastructure and producing excessive system alerts.

The main goal should involve scanning high-risk assets through continuous monitoring, but organizations should perform less frequent scans on their lower-risk systems. The current design of modern scanners operates to reduce system performance degradation, thus most people incorrectly believe these devices will cause significant disruptions.

Automation and Integration

Scaling continuous scanning requires automation and integration—connecting vulnerability scanners to CI/CD pipelines, cloud APIs, and ticketing systems. The combination of scan tools with CI/CD pipelines and cloud API monitoring enables vulnerability detection before production deployment.

The system directs alerts to appropriate teams through automated processes, which use asset criticality levels to determine response speed. The dashboard system monitors scan coverage while showing vulnerable areas and performs immediate scans on all new assets.

Measuring Program Effectiveness

Program effectiveness measurement serves to demonstrate the worth of the program.

Coverage metrics track:

1. Scheduled scan completion rates.
2. Time-to-first-scan after asset discovery.
3. Asset inventory accuracy and freshness.

Effectiveness metrics include:

1. Vulnerability detection rates.
2. MTTD (Mean Time to Detect)
3. MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate)
4. SLA compliance by severity level.

The program health metrics system tracks three essential elements which include schedule compliance and coverage gaps, and discovery velocity.

Common Pitfalls

Common pitfalls undermine scanning program effectiveness:

• The use of compliance minimums creates security vulnerabilities which allow attackers to stay inside a network for 45 to 90 days.
• Outdated asset inventories render scanning ineffective—research shows 32% of cloud assets remain unmonitored without continuous discovery, creating blind spots where threats operate undetected.
• The failure to perform event-triggered scans results in the continuation of newly discovered system vulnerabilities.
• Treating all assets equally wastes resources on low-risk systems while under-protecting critical infrastructure—risk-based prioritization is essential.
• Event-triggered automated scanning reduces human error, shortens exposure windows, and accelerates remediation—ultimately reducing breach risk and improving MTTR.

FAQs

Conclusion

The question "how often should you perform vulnerability scans?" has no universal answer—it depends on how fast your attack surface changes. Organizations deploying cloud infrastructure daily cannot rely on quarterly scans designed for monthly change windows.

With 768 CVEs exploited in the wild in 2024, attackers weaponizing vulnerabilities within 7-14 days, and the industry average MTTR sitting at 74 days, quarterly scans add 45 days before detection even begins—extending total exposure to 119+ days of undetected risk.

Modern security requires continuous attack surface monitoring for cloud environments, daily vulnerability scanning for critical systems, and weekly assessment for stable infrastructure where changes occur predictably. But scanning frequency alone isn't sufficient—asset discovery must run even more frequently since 32% of cloud assets sit unmonitored without continuous discovery.

The organizations succeeding are those treating security as continuous validation rather than periodic audits, where every infrastructure change triggers immediate assessment and every new asset gets scanned within minutes of discovery. Because in a world where attackers scan the entire internet in 24 hours and exploit critical vulnerabilities within a week, your quarterly scan schedule isn't security—it's a security theater with 90-day blind spots attackers exploit freely.