In December 2025, Cisco quietly dropped a bombshell on the vulnerability management market: Kenna Security, rebranded as Cisco Vulnerability Management, is being retired. The end-of-sale date is March 10, 2026. The last day to renew is June 11, 2026. And by June 30, 2028, the lights go off entirely. No new features. No connector updates. No CVSS v4 or EPSS v4 support. And perhaps most telling of all: Cisco has announced no replacement product.
If your organization relies on Kenna.VM, Kenna.VI, or the AppSec module, the clock is ticking. But this isn't just a forced migration; it's an opportunity to stop buying tools and start buying outcomes.
What Kenna Got Right, and Where It Stopped
Kenna Security deserves credit. When it launched, it helped popularize risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) at a time when most teams were drowning in unranked CVE lists from legacy scanners. Its risk scoring model gave security teams a way to cut through the noise and focus on what mattered most.
But the world has moved on. Infrastructure has sprawled across multi-cloud environments, on-premises data centers, Kubernetes clusters, SaaS applications, endpoints, and network devices. Development pipelines ship code faster than ever. And Kenna's model, fundamentally an aggregation and scoring layer that sat on top of other scanners, never fully evolved to keep pace.
The core limitations became clear over time. Kenna ingested vulnerability data from third-party scanners and applied its own risk scoring, but it operated in a silo. It lacked deep environmental context: it couldn't tell you whether a vulnerable asset was internet-facing, whether it had access to sensitive data, or whether a misconfiguration alongside a CVE created a truly exploitable attack path. It scored vulnerabilities globally, not in the context of your specific environment. And as Cisco deprioritized the product, updates slowed, connectors aged, and the gap between what Kenna could see and what modern infrastructure demands widened.
The Real Problem: Vulnerability Aggregation Isn't Enough
The Kenna sunset exposes a deeper truth about traditional RBVM. Aggregating vulnerability data from multiple scanners into a single pane of glass and slapping a risk score on it was a meaningful step forward, in 2018. Today, it's table stakes at best and a false sense of security at worst.
Here's why. Traditional RBVM tools treat vulnerabilities as isolated findings. They can tell you that CVE-2024-XXXX has a high CVSS score and is being actively exploited in the wild. What they can't tell you is whether that vulnerability actually matters in your environment, whether the affected system is reachable from the internet, whether it runs in a container with elevated privileges, whether it has access to your production database, or whether the same issue was already patched in your infrastructure-as-code but drifted back in a recent deployment.
Security teams don't need another dashboard full of decontextualized severity scores. They don't need another tool to operate, tune, and babysit. They need a combination of intelligent automation and real human expertise that delivers outcomes: vulnerabilities found, prioritized, and fixed, delivered as a service so their team can focus on the work that actually moves the business forward.
Why Mondoo Is the Right Next Step
If you're evaluating alternatives to Kenna, you've probably noticed that every vulnerability management vendor is racing to claim the "Kenna replacement" mantle. Most of them are offering the same thing Kenna did, a vulnerability aggregation layer, just with a fresh coat of paint. They're selling you another tool to run. Another platform your team has to staff, configure, and maintain. Another vendor that hands you software and walks away.
Mondoo is a fundamentally different approach. Mondoo is a managed service that combines AI-powered agentic automation with dedicated human security expertise to deliver vulnerability management outcomes, not software licenses.
True Hybrid Coverage From a Single Platform
Kenna required you to feed it data from other scanners. Mondoo covers your entire environment directly: cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, on-premises servers and workstations, Kubernetes clusters and container images, SaaS applications, network devices like switches and firewalls, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code, and endpoints. All of it, with the same depth of coverage everywhere, assessed and managed by Mondoo's team.
This isn't just a convenience play. When your vulnerability management service has direct visibility into every layer of your environment, it can correlate findings across those layers in ways that an aggregation tool simply cannot.
Context-Driven Prioritization, Not Just Risk Scores
Mondoo's patented AI model doesn't just score vulnerabilities, it maps the relationships between assets, configurations, and vulnerabilities across your entire environment. It considers whether a vulnerable system is internet-exposed, what data it can access, what permissions it holds, and whether related misconfigurations amplify the risk. The result is prioritization based on actual exploitability and business impact, not just CVSS numbers.
This is the contextual analysis that Kenna was never designed to provide. Instead of presenting a ranked list of CVEs and leaving your team to investigate each one, Mondoo shows you the attack paths that matter and tells you exactly where to focus.
Agentic Remediation, Not Just Findings
Here's where Mondoo goes furthest beyond what Kenna ever offered. Most vulnerability management platforms stop at "here's what's wrong." Mondoo's AI agents don't just find vulnerabilities, they analyze the full context, determine remediation steps, generate pre-tested remediation code (Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, Intune, scripts), and can execute fixes with the level of human oversight you're comfortable with.
But agentic automation is only half the story. Behind the AI agents is a team of real security professionals who understand your environment, validate remediation plans, handle edge cases that require judgment, and ensure that what gets fixed stays fixed. This isn't a black-box algorithm making decisions in isolation. It's AI speed paired with human expertise, working together so your team gets results without having to become experts in yet another platform.
This is agentic vulnerability management: AI agents that continuously monitor, prioritize, remediate, and verify, backed by human specialists who bring the context and judgment that automation alone can't replicate. You don't operate the system. You receive the outcomes. That's the difference between buying a tool and buying a managed service that actually reduces your risk.
Built on Open Source, Built for Transparency
Mondoo is built on cnspec and the Mondoo Query Language (MQL), open-source tools that give you full visibility into every policy, check, and remediation action. Every decision the platform makes is auditable. You can review any change, inspect any policy, and roll back if needed. In a world where security teams need to trust their tools, this transparency is non-negotiable.
Compliance Built In, Not Bolted On
Kenna was a vulnerability management tool. Compliance was someone else's problem. Mondoo ships with 300+ out-of-the-box compliance frameworks, including PCI DSS, NIST, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2, and HIPAA, with continuous assessment and evidence collection baked directly into the platform. For organizations that need to demonstrate compliance alongside vulnerability management, this eliminates an entire category of tooling.
Moving From Kenna to Mondoo
Because Mondoo is a managed service, the transition looks nothing like a typical tool migration. You're not deploying software, hiring specialists to run it, or spending months tuning policies. You engage Mondoo, and Mondoo delivers your vulnerability management program.
Here's how it works:
1. Engage Mondoo. Reach out and tell us about your environment, your current Kenna setup, and your security goals. There's no lengthy procurement process for shelfware. You're hiring a team and a platform to deliver results.
2. Mondoo performs a comprehensive assessment. Our security experts, backed by agentic AI, assess your full environment: cloud, on-premises, endpoints, SaaS, network devices, CI/CD pipelines, and everything in between. This isn't a scan dump. It's a thorough evaluation of your actual risk posture, including the environmental context and attack paths that Kenna was never able to surface.
3. Mondoo delivers your vulnerability management program. Based on the assessment, Mondoo stands up your ongoing vulnerability management program. That means continuous scanning, contextual prioritization, pre-tested remediation code, and verified fixes, all managed by our team with the level of oversight and collaboration you want. Your team receives outcomes: risks identified, prioritized, and resolved. Not a dashboard to stare at.
4. Sunset Kenna with confidence. Once Mondoo is delivering full coverage and your team has validated the results, you can decommission Kenna, knowing you haven't just replaced a tool. You've replaced the entire operational burden with a managed service that continuously reduces your risk.
Don't Just Replace Kenna, Upgrade Your Entire Approach
Cisco's decision to sunset Kenna without a replacement product is a clear signal: the traditional RBVM model has run its course. Vulnerability aggregation was a bridge, not a destination. The organizations that treat this moment as a chance to modernize, not just migrate, will come out ahead.
Mondoo gives you everything Kenna did and more: direct scanning across hybrid environments, AI-driven contextual prioritization, automated remediation, compliance management, and full transparency through open source. And it delivers it all as a managed service, with agentic AI and dedicated human expertise working in tandem, so your team gets outcomes rather than another tool to operate. It's not just a Kenna replacement. It's what vulnerability management should have been all along.
Ready to stop managing tools and start receiving outcomes? Talk to Mondoo
