Patch management is a critical part of an organization's security strategy. It ensures software updates are distributed, security gaps are closed, and bugs are fixed while keeping the network stable and protecting sensitive data and information. Without a strong patch management policy or procedure, you could leave your network vulnerable to attack and damage your company’s reputation.
What Is Patch Management?
Patch management is the distribution of patches (updates) to every IT asset — servers, endpoints, mobile devices, applications — your company uses to ensure software, operating systems, and applications are secure and up-to-date.
Most patches close known security vulnerabilities to prevent hackers from exploiting this weakness. Other patches fix bugs, improve performance, add new features, or ensure compliance with industry or regulatory standards.
Why Patch Management Matters
Hackers and other bad actors regularly scan networks looking for unpatched applications and operating systems in hopes of finding and exploiting security gaps. Regular patch deployment and other updates improve your network security, reducing your attack surface to prevent data breaches and other hacks. It also maintains system stability, reduces downtime, and ensures your company complies with regulations like GDPR or PCI-DSS.
A patch management strategy also protects your company’s reputation and long-term health. Proactively preventing breaches lessens the possibility your company suffers a significant breach and the financial losses and penalties associated with it.
How Is Patch Management Different From Vulnerability Management?
While patch management and vulnerability management seem like the same thing, they’re separate but interrelated concepts.
Patch management is one part of your entire cybersecurity strategy. It has a narrow focus on deploying security patches and software updates to address known issues.
Vulnerability management is a much larger part of your overall security planning. It’s the identification, prioritization, and mitigation of security risks across all systems, endpoints, and software, whether there’s a patch for a known vulnerability or not or when patches are impractical to deploy.
For example, the PrintNightmare vulnerability was a security flaw in Windows’s print spooler service. Hackers could exploit this vulnerability to gain control of a computer, but the “nightmare” part was that the vulnerability didn’t require physical access to the printer or computer. The attack could be executed remotely. Microsoft released an initial patch that only partly addressed the vulnerability, so additional security patches were released.
Your patch management process would be to test and deploy the security patches as they were released. But your vulnerability management process would be to identify if your endpoints and networks were impacted by the vulnerability and devise a strategy to mitigate the risk until the security patch or patches were released, say turning off the print spooler service until you knew the fix worked.
How Does Patch Management Process Work?
Patch management is more than finding and deploying patches. Patch management best practices also include testing patches before deployment and documenting the success or challenges of each.
Discovery
Discovery, or inventory, is the foundation of an effective patch management program. Before you can patch anything, you have to know what needs patching. This means identifying and tracking every asset your company uses and where. That includes:
- Hardware: every endpoint, server, smart device, and mobile device
- Software: operating systems, applications, including third-party, open-source, and custom tools
- Version and patch information: the current version number and patch history for all software
Ongoing monitoring of assets is crucial since assets are constantly added, removed, and reconfigured. Most organizations use an automated inventory tool that’s built into the patch manager software or is part of a broader IT asset management tool to track asset changes and provide broader visibility into the patching process.
Monitoring
Like asset discovery, IT needs to monitor and track patch releases, software updates, and disclosures from vendors or other trusted security sources to stay ahead of known threats. Monitoring ensures the team knows when patches are available and enables them to deploy critical patches quickly so they can proactively respond to emerging threats and critical vulnerabilities.
An automated patch management solution can handle the monitoring for you, tracking vendor and vulnerability management databases for new patches or known exploits, and alert the team. Advanced tools may even map the patch to your system so you know exactly which devices or applications are impacted.
Assessment and Prioritization
One of the challenges of any patch management process is the volume of patches the team needs to test and deploy. Even small companies with few endpoints may find it difficult to apply every patch as quickly as possible. That's where assessment and prioritization comes in.
Instead of applying every patch as soon as it’s available, the team evaluates each patch to decide if it should be deployed, and if so, how quickly. While there are several methods that help IT teams assess and prioritize patching, it generally comes down to evaluating if the patch is relevant to your system, how urgent or critical the patch is, and the impact deploying or not deploying the patch has on overall business operations.
Testing
While you can be reasonably confident that a patch will close a known vulnerability or enhance functionality, testing the patch in a staging environment ensures it’s compatible with your current system configurations. If you have unique or custom configurations, you can’t be sure how the patch will impact your endpoints, and testing prior to deployment helps identify potential issues before they cause problems, like an application crashing on start-up or causing a computer to run slowly.
Deployment
Patch deployment is installing the patch on every endpoint that needs it. Many companies use a phased rollout plan in case the testing phase missed something. The patch is deployed to a small group of endpoints and monitored to ensure the patch works as expected. This gives the team a chance to roll back the update in the event something doesn’t work as planned without causing widespread interruptions or downtime across the entire company.
Verification
Verification confirms that the correct patches were successfully applied, that no errors or failures occurred during deployment, and the system is operating as expected. Most patch management software solutions have a patch management dashboard that scans the system to ensure the patches were installed and the vulnerability was remediated.
Documentation
An effective patch management program should also document what was patched, when, who patched it, and why. These records are useful for internal audits, meeting regulatory compliance, and helping the team identify trends or recurring issues.
Common Patch Management Challenges
Though patch management plays an important role in protecting against security vulnerabilities and other threats, it comes with challenges that can and should be addressed.
Fragmented
While most companies don’t have a manual patch management process, using multiple tools and systems can lead to a patch management process that consists of disconnected tasks. For example, there may be one tool for vulnerability management or scanning and another system that deploys patches while inventory is managed in a shared spreadsheet.
This fragmentation can also increase the possibility of security risks or gaps due to human error or missed communications. It can be harder to track the progress or success of deployment, increases the risk of missed updates, and can slow down response time in high-risk or critical situations.
It can also impact how well your security team performs. They may be overwhelmed by the patches they have to review, test, and deploy, leading to the possibility that the team overlooks critical patches or doesn’t prioritize which patches to deploy.
Diverse Environments
It’s common for corporate systems to use a variety of operating systems, third-party applications, and devices. One team might use Windows while another needs Linux, not to mention your network may have legacy systems that are difficult to patch or allow mobile and personal devices access.
While the diversity may be necessary for your company to operate, it can make it difficult to ensure consistent patching across all environments. Every vendor may have a different patch release schedule, while some may have an intermittent one, making monitoring and testing patches a challenge.
Patch Volume
Even the most bare-bones systems will need multiple patches to keep the operating system and applications safe and secure. Vendors and developers know this, which is why new patches are released all the time.
Beyond the sheer volume of patches that are released, it’s up to the IT team to ensure all the endpoints are patched, meaning larger teams will have more work to do. They have to sift through every patch to see which ones are most critical and relevant to their business needs, then deploy and monitor everything.
How Patch Management Tools Improve the Patch Management Process
A solid patch management software or tool can make your patch management program smoother, allowing your IT team to work on mission-critical tasks. Here’s what to look for in a patch management solution.
Automation
Tools that automate your patch management process from end to end, free up security teams for other tasks. Look for something that:
- Scans your environment for missing patches
- Monitors vendors for new releases and announcements
- Flags vulnerabilities based on severity
- Deploys patches based on your patch management policy
- Sends alerts for failed deployments or when an endpoint misses a patch
- Automatically rolls back failed or problematic patches
Flexible Deployment
Patches have to be deployed when endpoints are connected to the system. The problem is most endpoints are connected during the workday when employees need to use their devices.
A patch management tool with flexible deployment options allows you to schedule how and when patches are deployed to minimize the interruption to the business. You should be able to set deployment times outside of the regular business day and control the rebooting process so no one is caught off guard.
Prioritization
Not every patch that’s released is critical or needs to be installed immediately. An automated patch management software or tool that includes prioritization features ensures the system isn’t bogged down or overloaded trying to deploy and install every patch in favor of prioritizing critical patches first.
Adaptiva Is a Proactive Patch Management Solution
Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch is an automated patch management solution that allows your team to quickly and autonomously remediate vulnerabilities. It integrates with vulnerability management tools and gives teams full control over the patching process, including the ability to pause, cancel, and roll back deployments. Contact us today and schedule a demo.
