Patch compliance is one part of your compliance management program, and that one part plays a significant role in your company’s reputation, performance, and bottom line. Beyond ensuring your endpoints are secure and compliant with your internal policies, your patch compliance program documents that you’re in compliance with any required legal and industry standards.
What Is Compliance Management?
Compliance management is the policies and procedures your company puts in place to ensure your business complies with all the legal and regulatory standards you’re subject to. Those legal and regulatory standards cover a wide range of things, like HR practices and safety standards, but also include information and security practices.
Your information and security compliance management policies define the ongoing monitoring and assessment your company does to ensure your systems meet industry and security standards, data protection laws, and regulatory standards.
The standards and laws vary by industry and location, but some of the more common examples of compliance management are:
- Data privacy. Because companies store all kinds of customer information and data, more and more countries, states, and industries are implementing privacy standards your company may need to comply with. Depending on where your company is located and where you do business, you may be subject to General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
- Financial compliance. The financial industry is heavily regulated to help prevent fraud and reduce financial risks to customers. Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations and the Dodd-Frank Act ensure companies verify who their customers are and follow best practices to reduce risk to their systems.
- Healthcare privacy. Healthcare providers must keep sensitive patient information secure, which is why they must comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) and GDPR standards.
Failing to meet these standards could result in serious fines if your data is breached.
What Is Patch Compliance?
Patch compliance is part of your compliance management. It’s the policies, procedures, and tools that your company uses to keep endpoints, operating systems, and third-party applications up-to-date and in line with current regulatory and industry standards.
The Benefits of Patch Compliance
Maintaining patch compliance is so much more than checking off legal and regulatory boxes. A single unpatched vulnerability gives attackers the opportunity to exploit weaknesses and expand an ongoing attack, causing even greater damage. Staying on top of these risks helps your company avoid expensive breaches and the resulting financial penalties, not to mention protecting your company’s reputation.
Finances
A robust and effective patch compliance program helps your company’s bottom line. When your system is secure, a devastating hack that brings your company to a halt or having to pay a ransom to get your data back is far less likely. What’s more, when you follow current and established legal standards, you don’t have to worry about paying fines for noncompliance.
Reduces Security Risks
A patch compliance program ensures you’re proactively identifying and addressing security risks. Staying on top of these risks helps your company avoid expensive security breaches and the resulting financial penalties, not to mention it protects your company’s reputation.
Audit Readiness
Saying your endpoints are patched and secure and proving they’re patched and secure are two different things. Without documentation that every endpoint is up-to-date, you could fail an audit, resulting in costly fines and fees. A large part of the patch compliance process is documenting which endpoints are patched and which ones aren’t.
Even if a regulatory audit isn’t a concern, these audits provide insight into all the endpoints that connect to your network, helping you identify which ones are in compliance, which ones have drifted out of compliance, and which ones you shouldn’t allow on your system until they’re updated.
Keeps Business Moving
Finally, patch compliance ensures your business keeps moving. Staying current with updates helps prevent endpoint crashes and workstation issues while keeping systems running smoothly. Over time, your IT team has fewer disruptions, allowing them to focus on high-impact tasks.
Challenges of Patch Compliance Programs
While some companies don’t use a compliance management or patch compliance program, others have one that looks fine on paper, but doesn’t get the job done.
Unclear Roles and Responsibilities
Laying out the patch compliance procedures is a critical step in ensuring your systems are safe. However, without a clear understanding of who is responsible for what, the program may not achieve the results you’re looking for.
Human Error
Some companies assume they’re too small to need an automated patch management and patch compliance program. But even with a small number of endpoints, mistakes can happen. A device is left at home one day, or someone is out sick, and now that endpoint is missing patches, leading to gaps in your security.
Assuming Not Verifying
Patch deployment doesn’t mean an endpoint is in compliance with your configurations or the regulatory guidelines. Without documentation that the patch was successfully deployed, installed, and tested, there’s no way to know or prove in an audit that each and every endpoint is patched.
Patching Remote Endpoints
Even when employees use on-premises devices at headquarters, tracking and ensuring remote devices are patched presents a challenge. Do employees take home laptops to work nights and weekends? What happens if a device is offline when you deploy patches? Your patch compliance system must also include these types of devices to ensure they aren’t skipped during the rollout.
Legacy Systems
Legacy systems are often the biggest challenge to successful patch compliance programs. Older operating systems may no longer receive patches and updates, requiring custom solutions from your IT team. Bespoke systems that were tailored to or even designed by your company may be more difficult to patch and keep secure.
Limited Connectivity
Endpoints with limited or intermittent connectivity can make patch compliance difficult. Fleet devices, remote endpoints, or endpoints with unreliable network access may not be connected when patches are deployed. When that happens, critical updates may be delayed or even missed, leaving these endpoints with unpatched vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of exploitation.
Regulations and Standards Change
Keeping up with regulatory and legal standards can feel like a game of Whack-a-Mole. Because cyber threats are constantly evolving, regulatory standards adapt and change almost as frequently. The compliance management and patch compliance process you set up a few months ago may be outdated before you’ve barely had a chance to test it, requiring a retooling of your procedures.
Best Practices for Patch Compliance Programs
No matter how large or small your organization is, a patch compliance program helps IT stay on top of its patch management tasks and ensures you comply with required legal and compliance frameworks. What’s more, automating your patch management program eases the burden on staff and reduces the likelihood of introducing errors or compliance drift.
Establish a Patch Compliance Policy and System
Your patch management policy will outline who is responsible for what, when things need to get done, and how the patching will happen. These clear guidelines will help everyone understand what their role is and prioritize which patches are deployed first.
Automate Patch Management Processes
Smaller companies may have the most to gain from automating their patch compliance programs. With limited resources, people in IT often wear multiple hats and may have to handle patching after hours or alongside other critical tasks. Automation reduces this burden while also reducing the likelihood that someone introduces an error or that an endpoint drifts out of configuration.
What’s more, patch management software handles the downloading, scanning, testing, and rollback of patches while documenting the entire process for you. The hands-off approach makes it simple for you to prove your patch compliance program works while freeing up IT to work on high-impact tasks.
Include Exceptions
While automating patch management ensures most of your endpoints are in compliance, it won’t get every endpoint every time. Sometimes a device is offline, and other times the endpoint can’t deploy the patch. Whatever the reason an endpoint is skipped, your patch compliance program should outline what to do when there’s an exception: how does the team document the exception, what’s the patch status, and how should the team correct the deficiency?
Demonstrate the Impact
Like any part of running a business, you need to know and show how your patch compliance program is impacting your business. Setting reasonable KPIs and measuring long-term performance helps you document that impact and course-correct when things aren’t going as planned. Tracking how quickly patches are deployed or how many are applied in a month or quarter is a good place to start.
Autonomous Patch Compliance With Adaptiva
A patch compliance program is so much more than a box to check to ensure you meet legal and compliance requirements. It represents the proactive steps your company takes to secure your endpoints wherever they are. While manual processes can get the job done, they’re often slow, messy, and prone to errors.
Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch makes autonomous patch management and patch compliance easy. Define your strategy, set your rules, and let OneSite handle the rest. Book a demo today and see how Adaptiva can improve your patch compliance program.
