Just because an organization finds a vulnerability in its infrastructure doesn’t necessarily mean that the problem will be fixed. NASA, for instance, has more than 378,000 unpatched exploits across its employee endpoints as of August.

IBM Corp. and Carbon Black Inc. today set out to relieve that situation, which is most commonly caused by shortages of information technology workers.

The companies are rolling out a new joint offering that can use the enterprise technology giant’s Big Fix tool to quickly identify undiscovered vulnerabilities in a company’s systems. Once the scan is complete, positive hits are correlated against activity data from the Carbon Black Endpoint Security Platform to see whether hackers are exploiting unpatched issues to eavesdrop on employee devices. And the automated analysis also draws upon IBM’s QRadar Security Intelligence Platform for insight about malicious activity at the network level.

According to Big Blue and Carbon Black, the result is a prioritized vulnerability list customized for every organization that displays the items requiring urgent attention in the order of their severity. It’s designed to help budget-strapped IT departments solve the biggest security problems in their infrastructure without having to manually find every issue on their own. Even if a company doesn’t have the resources to address the smaller issues in its systems, plugging the most important security gaps still has the potential to reduce the amount of damage that hackers can cause.

IBM plans to resell Carbon Black’s endpoint protection software as part of their partnership to make it easier for its customers to take advantage of the joint offering. That’s a big win for the security company, which will now have one of the IT industry’s biggest salesforces promoting its technology around the world.

The deal is made even more significant by the fact that it’s reportedly looking to go public in the foreseeable future. According to the Wall Street Journal piece that broke the news last week, Carbon Black is valued at around $600 million.

Every new reseller agreement and customer that the firm obtains before hitting the stock exchange will improve its odds of reaching its funding goals. Given how the last security company that launched a public offering this year failed to meet expectations, Carbon Black is no doubt keenly aware of the stakes.

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