Welcome to part two of our Q&A series with Dan Richings, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success and Solutions at Adaptiva. In this installment, Dan dives deep into the critical role of automation in modern patch management, the importance of prioritizing vulnerabilities, and the pitfalls of relying on legacy systems.
He also shares insights into the future of patching, including how AI is reshaping the landscape, and offers strategic advice for CISOs and IT leaders.
If you're navigating the complexities of enterprise patching, this post offers invaluable guidance to stay ahead of emerging security threats.
Question: Dan, what’s the role of automation in modern patching? Can automation alone guarantee a strong security posture?
Dan: "Automation streamlines the entire patch management process - from identifying required patches and packaging them with the necessary metadata, to distributing and deploying them across the environment. It also ensures accurate reporting on installation status and success, reducing manual effort and minimizing risk.
Reporting is also a critical component of end-to-end patch automation, enabling the entire process, once fully manual, to run autonomously with oversight. Previous vendor solutions often failed to address the full patching lifecycle. Today, organizations require comprehensive automation that covers every phase, from detection to deployment to reporting.
While automation helps reduce human error and enable faster deployments, automation alone cannot guarantee a strong security posture. As a tool, automation’s goal is to achieve the same repeatable result every single time, but it should not be considered a silver bullet in a security strategy. Organizations do not want to end up doing the wrong things faster, so if the initial configuration isn’t correct, things can go wrong quickly, which is why human oversight is crucial. "
How should organizations prioritize which vulnerabilities to patch first, especially when dealing with thousands of endpoints?
Dan: While automation drives efficiency, human oversight remains essential for patch prioritization. Most organizations rely on severity data from sources like threat intelligence platforms or NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD). To make informed decisions, it’s critical to evaluate these sources holistically, aligning threat intelligence with real-world risk.
What mistakes do companies make when relying on legacy patch management systems or manual processes?
Dan: Legacy systems rely on manual, poll-based updates, making real-time visibility and responsiveness a challenge for organizations. While modern architectures have shifted to push-based models, many solutions still rely on outdated polling methods - resulting in delayed patch deployment, slow response times, and reporting lags of up to 48 hours.
Legacy poll-based systems are slow to react, deploy, and report - often taking 24 to 48 hours to deliver scan results. If metadata updates are delayed, the system may scan against outdated information, leading to false compliance reports and leaving critical vulnerabilities undetected.
In your view, what’s the future of patching? And how must organizations evolve to stay ahead of emerging threats?
Dan: Organizations need an always-on solution that continuously scans for and retrieves the latest vendor patches. Continuous, autonomous patching is the future of patch management. In today’s threat landscape, companies can no longer afford to wait six to 12 months after a vendor releases an update to apply patches.
Given the scale of today's patching demands, human effort alone can't ensure complete visibility. AI enhances IT and security teams’ ability to identify compliance gaps, detect missing patches, and deploy fixes rapidly. As threats evolve, AI integrates with threat intelligence to prioritize patches in real time, enabling a shift from reactive to proactive security. The ideal outcome: teams are alerted that an exploit was detected and automatically patched.
If you could give one piece of advice to a CISO or IT leader trying to modernize their patching process, what would it be?
Dan: Find a patch management solution that delivers both autonomy and control. Staying on top of the volume of vulnerabilities with the ability to monitor and react to situations as they occur is crucial to succeed in today’s threat environment. This will also help organizations shift into a proactive approach to securing their infrastructures.
Thank you for your insights, Dan. To learn more about how Adaptiva can help your organization, please book a demo here.
Missed Part 1? [Catch up here] to learn how it started.
