Vulnerability management and patch management are two separate and distinct parts of your cybersecurity plans with the same end goals: reducing your attack surface, minimizing security risks, and keeping your network safe. While they are separate and distinct, using only vulnerability management or only patch management as your security plan is risky. These two parts rely on each other to create a strong defense that protects your digital assets.
So what’s the difference between patch management and vulnerability management, and how are they similar? What are the risks of using one over the other? This guide explains it all.
What Is Patch Management?
Patch management is a structured, organized approach to patching your network, keeping it safe and secure. Patches:
- Correct known vulnerabilities
- Fix bugs
- Improve system and hardware performance
- Add or update features in your operating system, applications, firmware, and drivers
You’ll identify, test, and deploy patches for your primary operating systems, customizations, and third-party applications.
Why Patch Management Is Important
Patch management is often a key part of an IT team’s day-to-day responsibilities. However, the importance of an orderly and strategic approach cannot be understated. Without a solid plan, IT may miss critical updates that leave you exposed to hackers. A patch management process:
- Ensures known and new security gaps are closed
- Keeps devices stable, so endpoints don’t crash.
- Maintains compliance with any regulatory and legal requirements you have to follow
- Reduces the risk that your company experiences a data breach, outage, or suffers an expensive ransomware attack
What Is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is similar to patch management in that it’s an ongoing process that manages and reduces risk in a proactive, structured way. However, unlike patch management, vulnerability management is a broader, more strategic approach to cybersecurity in that it helps IT find, assess, and correct weaknesses throughout the network, including the ones a patch can’t fix.
Vulnerability management:
- Includes an asset inventory so you know every device, hardware, and software on your system
- Gives you a framework to identify and prioritize every vulnerability in your system
- Helps IT teams create a plan of attack for remediating these vulnerabilities
- Verifies that the fixes worked and flags when they didn’t
Why Vulnerability Management Is Important
No matter how stable and secure an application or operating system is, new and emerging threats are discovered and exploited every day. A strong vulnerability management system ensures IT stays ahead of bad actors by:
- Prioritizing which patches should be deployed first, ensuring critical security gaps are closed as soon as possible
- Reducing the long-term risk that a bad actor exploits a security vulnerability
- Identifying the security risks that a patch can’t fix, like a misconfigured endpoint or failure to use 2FA
- Giving the team insight into weaknesses across endpoints, servers, and configurations
Common Misconceptions About Patch Management and Vulnerability Management
Patch and vulnerability management work together as part of a strategic approach to network security. However, there are some misconceptions about what patch management and vulnerability management can and can’t accomplish individually.
- Patching fixes vulnerabilities. Deploying a patch is only part of your security plan. Without validating that the patch is installed correctly on every endpoint, your network may still be at risk.
- Every patch is critical. Just because a patch exists doesn’t mean it’s critical to your system, configurations, or your risk tolerance.
- Patches must be deployed immediately. When a patch is critical to your security, you may be in a rush to get it pushed out as quickly as possible. But skipping the crucial process of testing and validating updates in favor of patching “right now” could leave you vulnerable to attack.
- Compliance is the same as security. Passing a regulatory audit doesn’t automatically mean your system is secure. The minimum standards — if they exist — are often behind new and emerging threats and techniques. Complying with audit standards could still mean you have security issues across your entire IT environment.
- Only big companies are at risk. While big companies are valuable targets, smaller companies are equally likely to be attacked. The IT bugs, known software flaws, and other security issues can be exploited even when you’re a company of one.
How Are Patch Management and Vulnerability Management Similar?
Patch management and vulnerability management have overlapping goals. They work in tandem to strengthen your security posture, reducing the risk of downtime due to an unstable endpoint or a larger system breach.
Ongoing and Continuous
New vulnerabilities are identified every day, and vendors release patches and updates regularly. As a result, patch management and vulnerability management require regular and continuous monitoring of your systems.
Asset Visibility
Any successful security plan relies on knowing exactly which assets you have to protect. Without exact knowledge of your hardware and software, both your patch management and vulnerability management programs won’t be as robust as they need to be.
Risk-Based Prioritization
Because there’s so much new information, patch management and vulnerability management both rely on risk-based prioritization and decision-making to ensure the most critical updates are made first.
Compliance
Patch and vulnerability management also help you comply with regulatory and security requirements, like HIPAA or SOC2.
Collaboration
Because vulnerability management and patch management have similar goals, neither can succeed without the other. Both require IT and security teams, as well as operations staff and stakeholders, to collaborate on both processes to balance security and stability with operational goals and business priorities.
How Are Patch Management and Vulnerability Management Different?
Ultimately, vulnerability management and patch management work together to reduce your attack surface. But while they have similar goals, your patch and vulnerability management processes use different approaches to achieve them.
Reactive vs. Proactive
Patch management is often reactive. It remediates a security vulnerability or other flaw after it’s identified. Vulnerability management tends to be more proactive, with security teams actively looking for security gaps and correcting them before they’re exploited.
Narrow vs. Broad
Patch management focuses solely on acquiring, testing, and patch deployment and updates. Vulnerability management is broader. For example, while vulnerability management includes remediating software vulnerabilities, it also covers misconfigurations, insecure settings, and other security weaknesses.
Scheduled vs. Prioritized
While both processes aim to reduce risk, they accomplish the goal differently. Patch management is often scheduled (like Patch Tuesday for Windows). Prioritization still matters (critical patches will be tested and deployed first), but even then, the prioritization happens on a fixed schedule. Vulnerability management focuses on risk, identifying critical vulnerabilities, and ensuring the patches are deployed quickly, often outside of the regular patching schedule.
Operational vs. Strategic
Patch management focuses on keeping systems up to date and operational so there’s no system outage. Vulnerability management is more strategic. The focus is on understanding and prioritizing the risks across the entire system and minimizing those risks to reduce downtime for any reason.
How Patch and Vulnerability Management Work Together (and Why It Matters)
Patch and vulnerability management are most effective when they work in tandem as part of a broader risk-reduction strategy.
Vulnerability management identifies the critical cyber threats, security risks, and vulnerable systems across the entire network, which adds context to patch management. Not all vulnerabilities are equal, and vulnerability management helps patch management in prioritizing security weaknesses to decide which patches and software updates should be deployed first, and which ones can wait.
Working together, patch management and vulnerability management shrink your attack surface. The patch is deployed, and vulnerability scanning validates that the patch worked, preventing gaps, misconfigurations, or failed deployments from being missed.
What’s more, most regulations require you to have a patch management and vulnerability management program in place to defend and remediate your network. When these processes are in sync, your patch and vulnerability management programs create an audit trail and document your compliance.
What’s the Risk When Patch Management and Vulnerability Management Aren’t in Sync?
Different teams may run your patch and vulnerability management processes, but collaborating, coordinating, and communicating between them is critical for success. Failing to sync the two could result in security gaps your team may not even realize exist.
Vulnerabilities Aren’t Addressed
One of the best ways to manage vulnerabilities is to prioritize vulnerabilities. This is the heart of vulnerability management: determining which gap is addressed first. Without this critical context and insight, patch management may be scattershot. Vulnerabilities may be patched in order of the oldest or most recent first, instead of remediating the vulnerabilities that are critical to your company’s operations.
Productivity Is Impacted
The sheer amount of patches sent out in a month or even a week is bound to keep your IT teams busy. But being busy isn’t the same as being productive and could lead to the team being overwhelmed and even burned out. Patching that isn’t guided by threat intelligence and risk assessment could result in IT teams doing a lot of work without achieving a meaningful impact on security.
Disconnected Audit Trail
Many regulatory frameworks require identification and remediation of vulnerabilities. When vulnerability and patch management are disconnected, the paper trail you need to prove compliance may not connect the dots easily. The timeline from identification to remediation to validation may be inconsistent and unclear, making it difficult to prove you’re doing what you’re supposed to.
Misplaced Confidence
A part of the patch management lifecycle is validating the patch post-deployment, which should flag any endpoint that didn’t get the patch or when the patch didn’t apply correctly. It’s important, but not enough to truly secure your system. Failing to include vulnerability management as part of your security practices could mean you miss additional vulnerabilities, like new threats that emerge after patching, or that you need to reconfigure certain settings to ensure the patch works as intended.
Adaptiva Patch Management and Vulnerability Management
Your vulnerability management and patch management processes work together to help your IT and security teams respond quickly to novel threats, work efficiently, and strengthen your security posture. Integrating both processes into your security plans ensures you achieve the best results as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch solution is the fastest way to autonomously patch endpoints. Integrated risk-based prioritization helps your team determine which patches should be deployed now and which ones can wait. Contact us today to schedule a demo and learn how Adaptiva can help your IT team secure and protect your network autonomously.
