When Every Hour Counts: How Software Escrow Protects Against a Vulnerability and Exposure Management Vendor Shutdown
In February 2025, Skybox Security, a long-standing provider of vulnerability and exposure management (VEM) solutions, abruptly ceased operations. Its customers suddenly lost access to the dashboards, models, and risk visibility they relied on daily to identify, prioritise, and remediate vulnerabilities across complex infrastructures.
When a vendor in this category disappears, the impact can be severe. Disrupted vulnerability scans, loss of remediation workflows, and broken integrations with critical systems like SIEMs, ticketing platforms, and patch management tools. The result is blind spots, stalled remediation efforts, and increased exposure at the worst possible moment.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Organisations that already had software escrow or SaaS escrow agreements in place could have positioned themselves for recovery before the crisis hit.
How Your Business Is Vulnerable When a Critical Vendor Fails
In this instance, where a vulnerability and exposure management platform is tightly embedded in organisation’s security operations. If the third-party provider suddenly goes out of business:
- Vulnerability visibility drops immediately. Without ongoing scans and prioritisation models, newly discovered CVEs may go unnoticed.
- Customised risk scoring and context is lost. Businesses can no longer rely on tailored prioritisation rules that factored in their unique infrastructure.
- Remediation workflows stall. Integrations with ticketing systems, SIEMs, and patching tools stop functioning, breaking the automation chains security teams depend on.
- Historical data disappears. Years of scan results, network topology mapping, and remediation history may be inaccessible, weakening long-term analysis.
- Time to migrate is tight. Switching to a new vendor means evaluation, configuration, data migration, and retraining, all while the attack surface grows.
This is why continuity planning for critical services, through mechanisms like software escrow and SaaS escrow, is essential.
The VEM-Specific Risks
VEM platforms face unique risks that make software or SaaS escrow protection even more critical:
Rapid Market Consolidation: The cybersecurity industry sees frequent acquisitions, with VEM vendors particularly attractive targets. Acquisitions often lead to product discontinuation or forced migrations.
Technology Obsolescence: VEM tools must constantly evolve with new attack vectors. Vendors that can’t keep pace may shut down suddenly.
Regulatory Pressure: Increasing compliance requirements put pressure on smaller VEM vendors who lack resources for regulatory adaptation.
Customer Concentration Risk: Many VEM vendors depend on a small number of enterprise customers. Losing key clients can trigger immediate closure
How Software Escrow and SaaS Escrow Provide Protection
The Escrow Company offers solutions that directly address these risks. They ensure customers can access the critical assets needed to continue operations if their vendor fails.
- Up-to-Date Source Code and Build Assets
With a software escrow agreement, critical elements like the third-party provider’s source code, build scripts, dependency manifests, and integration connectors can be securely deposited. If a release was triggered, beneficiaries would be able to access these materials to redeploy and maintain the platform independently, or with support from a third-party.
- Cloud Infrastructure and Deployment Templates
For SaaS escrow, additional assets such as infrastructure-as-code templates, container images, and deployment pipelines are included. This allows customers to rebuild cloud or hybrid software environments and regain scanning and reporting functionality rapidly.
- Data Continuity Through Snapshots and Backups
A SaaS escrow agreement can cover regular backups or full snapshots covering vulnerability data, remediation tickets, custom scoring models, and network mapping in this example. Access to data ensures organisations don’t lose historical context and can continue future services based on their own established parameters and historical information.
- Standby SaaS Continuity Environments
The Escrow Company also provides SaaS continuity escrow and Recovery SaaS escrow, where a replicated environment is deployed, maintained and can be activated for a defined period (e.g., 90 days) or passed to the beneficiary. This “standby mode” keeps workflows operational while longer-term vendor migration is tackled.
- Automated Deposits and Independent Verification
Escrowed assets are only useful if they are complete and current. The Escrow Company supports automated deposits directly from version control systems (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) and cloud providers. Our verification services ensure deposits complete, buildable (for on-premise solutions), deployable (for SaaS/cloud solutions) and accompanied by any required credentials, documentation, or instructions reducing the risk of surprises at release time.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
If your VEM vendor or other critical supplier suddenly goes bust, refuses service or sells to a competitor, but you retain access to these escrowed assets, your business could:
- Continue running vulnerability scans and maintaining dashboards, following a failure, to a tested environment.
- Preserve historical data and custom prioritisation models for consistent risk management.
- Avoid blind spots while assessing and onboarding a replacement vendor.
- Shift from emergency reactive mode to a managed, methodical transition.
In short, software escrow and SaaS escrow don’t prevent the disruption of a vendor failure, but they transform the recovery process from a sudden cliff-edge drop into a controlled tested mechanism..
If your business relies on platforms such as vulnerability and exposure management or any other critical third-party software, now is the time to plan for continuity. Contact The Escrow Company to learn how our software escrow and SaaS escrow services can safeguard your operations against the unexpected.
