Contact us anytime to know more — Abhishek P., Founder & CFO CISIN
What is the Importance of Patch Management?
Patch management keeps computers and networks current with features. It functions important to an organization, helping ensure compliance with privacy and security regulations as well as updating software to support new hardware.
It is an indispensable way for an organization to keep itself current with relevant features and functions that they depend on for effective operations.
What is the Process of Patch Management?
Patch Management procedures depend upon whether or not a system being updated is standalone or networked corporate, with either type checking periodically to see if any patches are available and downloading and installing automatically if applicable.
Organizations use central patch management in networks to ensure software versions remain consistent across all computers rather than permitting each computer to download patches independently. A server monitors all hardware connected to the network for any missing patches, then downloads them, sending them directly out by an organization's patch policy.
A central patch management server offers more than simply automated patch management; it gives organizations some degree of control over this process.
If an organization determines that one patch poses problems, for instance, they can configure software used for managing patches to stop the further application of it.
Centralized patch management helps conserve bandwidth on the internet. From an efficiency perspective, having each computer download the same patch would waste precious bandwidth resources; having one server manage all this distribution saves on costs as it only needs to download it once before dispensing it to its designated computers.
Some managed service providers (MSPs) offer patch management as part of the network management services they offer their clients, helping reduce administrative overhead by handling patchwork internally. Patching often necessitates discovery and documentation requirements at each step, which MSPs are uniquely equipped to facilitate.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Patch Management Vs Vulnerability Management
Every vulnerability management solution must include patch management. Patch management is not always about slapping patches on every system you see.
You have three main options when a security vulnerability is discovered:
- If a vulnerability is present, install a patch to resolve the problem.
- Use compensating controls to mitigate the vulnerability without fully patching. When a patch or fix isn't yet available, this is a common way to purchase time to resolve the issue.
- Do nothing and accept the risks that come with this vulnerability.
Patching may be appropriate in certain instances; ultimately, it lies with each organization to select an effective course of treatment for themselves.
Though it can be easy to confuse vulnerability management and patch management with each other, understanding their differences is crucial for making informed decisions about risk reduction strategies.
Although both involve strategies designed to decrease exposure, patch management covers a much smaller scope.
Implement a holistic vulnerability management approach to gain a fuller understanding of your system and make more informed decisions.
Vulnerability Management refers to the practice of identifying, prioritizing, fixing and reporting security flaws within software or systems.
5 Steps to Implement Patch Management
It's important to include patch management in your vulnerability management program, but this is only one part of the equation.
The following steps are necessary to integrate patch management in your vulnerability management program successfully:
- Establish asset management: Visibility is key to reducing risk. Asset management solutions help you understand the assets that you own and their vulnerabilities. This knowledge allows you to identify vulnerabilities and remediate them, as well as communicate with your stakeholders.
- Prioritize vulnerabilities: It's not realistic to expect that every new vulnerability can be fixed immediately, given the limited resources available and the constantly changing threat landscape. Prioritization, therefore, is an important aspect of vulnerability management.
- Remediate vulnerabilities to reduce risk: It's important to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, but you won't reduce risk until you fix the problems.
- Measuring the success of your program for vulnerability management: It doesn't matter what fancy features are in a vulnerability-management solution as long as it adds value to you and your staff and meets the unique needs of your organization. You'll need to know how you will measure your success to be able to prove to the senior management that it is worth purchasing.
- Create partnerships and provide support: You want to be able to rely on a team to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.
What are the Advantages of Patch Management?
The major software vendors regularly release patches that can be used for three main purposes.
- Security vulnerabilities are addressed by patches. When a vendor of software discovers that a product has a potential security vulnerability, they will usually issue a fix to mitigate the risk. Security patches should be applied as quickly as possible by organizations, as hackers and malware writers are aware of the vulnerabilities that a security patch will correct. They actively search for systems without a security patch.
- The patches can be used to fix the bugs and improve stability.
- Patches are released by vendors to add new features. The growth in subscription-based software is causing more feature updates.
What Is The Challenge Of Patch Management?
Bugginess of patches is one of the primary challenges associated with patch management, often appearing either within the software being patched itself or other applications that depend on it.
Removal may become necessary if vendors release new updates that cannot coexist with an old patch on an installation, which also introduces issues into systems that were functioning perfectly previously; administrators should perform rigorous tests before deployment of any such updates.
Unconnected systems may not receive patches on time; for instance, mobile device users who only connect occasionally could go long periods without receiving patches from central management.
Therefore, setting up their device so it can manage patches independently may be more effective.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, remote working has increased drastically, and this presents new management issues: patch management for devices connected via various security mechanisms - some users might use VPN, single sign-on on the internet or log in individually - creating multiple paths into corporate networks that hackers could potentially breach and require more patches being deployed as a result of hackers' increased chances of access.
Lifecycle of Patch Management
The following are important steps that support the main stages of patch management:
- Inventorying of devices, operating systems, and applications
- Standardizing software is a decision that must be made.
- Categorizing IT Assets and Patches by Risk and Priority;
- Testing patches in an appropriate lab environment or sandbox;
- Running a Pilot on an Example of Devices (optional);
- Validating patches is a way to verify that patches have been installed on a system and detect missing patches.
- Planning the roll-out includes identifying those responsible and which patches are to be applied on what devices.
- Documenting patches, vulnerabilities, test results, and deployments helps to analyze and improve the process.
The patch management can be improved by creating a list with key performance indicators.
Patch Management Best Practices
MSPs, consultants and system management software providers have the expertise to make patch deployments smooth and efficient.
The following ten patch management recommendations are among the most commonly mentioned best practices.
- You should know what to patch. It is important to identify the targets as well as their location.
- Establish standard patching and emergency patching procedure. Installing emergency patches outside of the window established for regular patching is required. Both should have clear instructions.
- Understanding vendor release schedules is important. There are many different operating systems, software applications, and firmware, and the patch release schedules for each of them vary greatly.
- Create and maintain an accurate test environment. The test environment should be closely matched to the production environments, with all the workload variations, and it will have to be updated whenever the production environment changes. It can be costly and difficult to scale. A representative sample is used in place of this. A virtual test environment can be used to simulate the production environment using a single PC or cloud services such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. Online services can handle replication.
- Examine the results and process of patching. Reviewing the KPIs for patch management can help you identify areas that could be improved.
- Set patch priorities based on risk. Determine the criticality of assets according to how important they are to your business, downtime minimization and risk. Prioritize patches by risk level. Assign assets to a criticality level based on their importance to business processes, optimal downtime and vulnerability risks.
- Keep up with security issues. Subscribe to reliable sources for commercial software, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Common Vulnerability Scoring Systems of the U.S. Government. Use a software analysis tool for internally-developed applications to identify open-source components and those from third parties.
- Patches should be deployed as soon as possible.
- Implement production rollouts gradually. Initial rollouts should be devoted to less important systems. Continue the rollout if the patches work as expected.
- Prepare a rollback and contingency plan. Before deploying patches, create a snapshot or backup of the systems in case something goes wrong. This will allow them to be restored to their original state.
Patch Management Examples
Microsoft releases patches for its Windows Operating Systems and Office on Patch Tuesday of each month, typically by using Windows Update for standalone systems to download any available patches; Business environments usually rely on Windows Server Update Services, which has been specifically created to centralize patch management; there are various third-party WSUS options for downloading, managing and deploying Microsoft patches.
Linux is used by IT departments across industries for open-source systems maintenance. Patch management services for Linux systems can be managed similarly to that for Windows systems; however, due to different distributions.
MacOS provides its software update tool, but without centralized patch management, it may become challenging to support all systems at the same time; third-party tools for patch management exist that support macOS alongside Windows, Linux and other OSes.
Patch Management Is A Critical Component Of Cybersecurity And Vulnerabilities Management
Cybersecurity is the primary driver behind patch deployment. Patch management forms part of vulnerability management strategies which aim to discover, prioritize and remedy security weaknesses of network assets; risks identified can then be addressed either through upgrading software to the latest version or patching it to address identified risks.
Software patch testing involves multiple steps, such as documenting test processes for compliance with security standards and developing contingency plans to address vulnerabilities should security patches not be installed successfully.
The following are the steps involved in vulnerability management:
- Network scanning is used to find users and devices connected to the network.
- Penetration testing is a technique that mimics hacker tactics to find vulnerable areas of a network.
- Verification is the process of confirming that an identified vulnerability can be exploited.
- Mitigation steps are taken, for example, by taking vulnerable systems offline to stop them from being exploited until a patch becomes available.
- Reporting that utilizes data management, analytics, and visualization tools to evaluate the vulnerability management process of an organization and ensure compliance with regulations.
Viability software offers an assortment of tools dedicated to managing vulnerabilities and automating certain of these processes, with patch management as one feature of some vulnerability management applications.
What Is The Best Patch Management Software?
Many vendors provide both methods for patch management. Some vendors sell patch management as an independent product.
At the same time, most bundle it with other tools for IT system administration, endpoint monitoring, security compliance monitoring or compliance assessment purposes - such as Atera GFI LanGuard Kaseya VSA ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus SolarWinds Patch Manager as examples of such.
Cost-benefit analyses should be performed on patch management tools, taking into account their associated software, infrastructure and personnel expenses, as well as any possible regulatory impacts they could cause within an organization.
Before looking at products, organizations must develop and execute an effective patch management plan by ranking reasons for patch deployment and outlining who will participate in their implementation and testing as well as monitoring.
They'll find software that best meets their requirements.
Dashboards should be intuitive for use and comprehension, providing all of the essential data. Reporting and documentation tools must also be user-friendly in providing essential details regarding vulnerabilities, testing results and patch history.
Software should have capabilities of patching every major operating system or commercial app used within an organization - most vendors list which OSes/applications their software can address.
The following are other important features of patch management:
- Real-time visibility of network hardware and software.
- Prioritize patches based on criticality.
- Administrative controls for the approval of patches
- Patch automation - sometimes using software agents - with fine-tuning to make it easier to exclude specific patches and endpoints.
- Receive software patches and updates from vendors on time.
- The ability to program patch management policies in the system.
- Validation and verification of patches to ensure that they have been applied.
Organizations that invest the time and effort into crafting a patch policy, creating an extensive process for patch management and using leading software tools will find their IT systems more secure, dependable, and current with current technologies.
How To Implement A Patch Management System: Step-By-Step Instructions
Organizations typically aim to ensure software consistency across devices connected to their network by employing central patch management instead of having every computer download updates individually.
To protect sensitive information stored and transmitted across their networks, proper updating administration is vitally important.
Centralized patch management solutions provide organizations with a software application to download and distribute patches according to an organizational-wide patch management procedure.
Here are a few steps that will help explain this process to you.
1. Create Device Groups By OS, Critical Status, And Grouping
Risk evaluation should include applications and devices. It would help if you determined their importance within your organization as well as which data and processes could potentially be affected to prioritize accordingly and maintain security.
Priorities can then be set. It's key that security remains intact.
Patches should be applied, prioritizing those servers or computers which store confidential information; less important devices, rarely used ones or offline ones, should take second priority in terms of patch management.
To expedite this process efficiently, it may help if one uses a stepwise approach; furthermore, the chief information officer could consider creating device groups according to operating systems for easier patching management.
2. Inventory the Software in Use
Preparing an inventory that encompasses all operating systems and software assets is vitally important, beginning with making an inventory of patches installed; the current state will inform strategy.
Asset management software like Cyber Infrastructure Inc's Insight can assist with both manual inventory counts or automated ones and provides quick, easy views into all your assets, including installed software on all hardware assets.
3. Define Your Patch Management Policies
Once your priorities for devices have been established based on criticality, create and implement a policy for patch management to determine when and how security patches will be deployed.
Your patch management policy should provide specific procedures based on criticality, mitigation capability and risk associated with security vulnerabilities identified - an integral component of vulnerability management in any organization.
Patching servers storing sensitive client data should always take precedence over fixing other security problems on that same server, with priority given to applying those patches that mitigate more severe vulnerabilities than just one vulnerability at any given time.
4. Updates To The Patch Are Available
IT departments must monitor the patch deployment process closely to make certain all patches are being deployed appropriately and working as intended.
Utilizing patch management software may make this easier; moreover, monitoring also means making sure policies are effectively being enforced; IT staff members must evaluate whether patches are needed before scheduling updates according to plan.
5. Before Implementing Patches, Test Them First
As per industry best practices, patches should always be tested before being implemented, as they could potentially create issues within your system, and it's wiser to test patches in an environment before deployment.
Software companies sometimes release patches in haste that cause new issues for environments that had previously worked fine, making the tests necessary to verify whether or not these patches address vulnerabilities specifically intended to address.
It is, therefore, crucial for software firms to test patches extensively before implementing patch management for optimal results.
6. Make A Backup Of Your Production
Best practice dictates that after testing in a laboratory environment, it is crucial to create a backup of all data and settings set up within that environment, including any customizations done to software programs.
7. Patches Can Be Downloaded And Deployed
Once all steps have been completed, patches should be downloaded and installed immediately. These steps must be adhered to; any deviation could lead to serious problems within a company.
It is wise to follow a plan or policy when updating software; failure could bring with it updates that include bugs that cause serious disruption within company systems and software upgrades that cause further issues for employees and clients alike.
Utilizing a patch manager can simplify this process significantly; Windows Patch Management Tool is among the solutions, automating patches for servers, workstations, and devices running Linux/macOS and Unix software.
8. New Patches Should Be Classified And Documented
Record and categorize patches used so you can refer back to them later. Incorporating this detail into security procedures and policies.
Documenting system performance before and after patching will make dealing with future situations simpler; you will quickly be able to understand if an issue arises due to missing patches, malfunctioning patches or simply poor patch management policies. Remember, patch management policies must incorporate both critical updates as well as noncritical ones, along with scheduled maintenance intervals for optimal management practices.
The Latest Patch Management Trends And News
On May Patch Tuesday, Microsoft addressed 38 new vulnerabilities rated critical. Notable among them included an annoying Windows Secure Boot bug which requires extra work from administrators to resolve, an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability with zero-day exploit code available and an OLE remote code execution vulnerability affecting Microsoft Outlook.
Microsoft recently fixed two critical remote code implementation vulnerabilities in SharePoint Server and one Windows Network File System bug, prompting administrators to make security updates mandatory to protect systems against bootkit malware attacks.
We recently issued patches to address four security flaws found in its small-business network switches; the 350 Series Managed Switch, as well as 350X/350X stackable, managed switches, are affected.
Web user interface vulnerabilities could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code as root users; another proof-of-concept code exists, which could enable full attacks against vulnerable devices.
AI-driven patch management may soon offer administrators relief. AI tools will deliver higher levels of accuracy for anomaly detection and risk scoring algorithms, as well as automate remediation decisions with context understanding across assets and identities to prioritize, identify, and fix vulnerabilities with the minimal manual effort required.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Conclusion
Patch management involves the identification, testing and installation of patches to address security flaws or bugs within the software, add new features or address vulnerabilities that exist within it.
