What is Patch Management, Really?

What is patch management?

Patch management is the process in which security and/or IT teams identify and apply software or system patches to their organization’s endpoints when new patches or updates become available. Patch management best practices refer to processes and tasks that align with a proven ability to reduce corporate exposure to cyber threats.

Patch management is essential for minimizing your attack surface and keeping your cybersecurity game on point. Even so, many organizations struggle to keep up with patch management best practices and maintain good cyber hygiene. Whether it's on-premise complexity, dark endpoints, or plain old patch procrastination hindering your patching process, there’s no shortage of solutions that can help your organization improve its patching strategy.

At its core, patch management strengthens your endpoints to prevent attacks. An efficient patching strategy is one of the strongest methods of endpoint hardening to keep every device up to date, compliant, and secure to prevent attacks.

With an effective patch management solution and process in place, you can expand the consistency of deploying patches and be confident your software, hardware, and systems have the latest patches.

To learn more about patch management, check out this tutorial.

Patching moves to the cloud

Not so long ago, orgs were inhibited by ineffective, on-premise hardware and a maze of resources needed to manage it all. But now, many companies are revelling in the scalability, flexibility, and efficiency their multi-cloud investments bring.

As called out in our 2022 IT Trends Playbook, Gartner VP Milind Govekar said, “There’s really no business strategy anymore without cloud strategy.”

It’s exciting because cloud infrastructure is becoming increasingly programmable every day. That’s why you’re seeing more automation in infrastructure operation, overall.

The great thing about cloud-based infrastructure is that it requires far fewer manual interventions than its on-premises counterpart tools demand. And industries of all kinds are adopting the cloud at lightening speed.

Tech giant Gartner recently forecast end user spending on public cloud services to grow 21.7% in 2022. Based on their prediction, end user spending on cloud services will likely reach $482 billion by the end of the year.

On that note, let’s discuss cloud patch management best practices.

Top 4 best practices for cloud patch management

Being a patch management expert has also gotten a lot more complicated, especially in the last few years. Digital transformation and remote work have amplified the move to the cloud, but as a result, you’re likely patching on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments – no easy task!

To effectively patch your cloud-based infrastructure and maintain compliance and security across your organization, we’ve compiled these best practices.

1. Stay up-to-date on the latest vulnerabilities

By first understanding what the risks are, you can more appropriately block and remove threats.

First, make sure you have robust vulnerability detection and scanning capabilities to identify, categorize and manage incoming vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can include unsecured system configurations or missing patches, as well as other security-related updates in the systems connected to the enterprise network directly – remotely or in the cloud.

From Rapid7 and Tenable to Qualys, there are many powerful vulnerability scanning vendors to choose from. Make sure they’re integrated within your tech stack and work with your patch solution, such as Automox, to quickly take action against threats whether that’s a patch, a system reconfiguration, or the removal of vulnerable software.

Automox together with Rapid7 offers Automated Vulnerability Remediation (AVR) to help your team discover unmanaged endpoints and shorten vulnerability remediation cycles. AVR automatically ingests vulnerability information right from your existing scanning and detection solutions like Rapid7 InsightVM – just configure, ingest vulnerability information, and remediate.

2. Use a single solution for patching