What is the use of Patch Management?

Cyber Security
,
#1

Patch management fixes vulnerabilities on your software and applications that are susceptible to cyber-attacks, helping your organization reduce its security risk. System uptime: Patch management ensures your software and applications are kept up-to-date and run smoothly, supporting system uptime.

  • The purpose of patch management is to keep updating various systems in a network and protect them against malware and hacking attacks.
  • Many enterprise patch management tools manage the patching process by installing or deploying agents on a target computer, and they provide a link between centralized patch servers and computers to be patched.

Patch Management is the process by which businesses/IT procure, test, and install patches (changes in code or data) intended to upgrade, optimize, or secure existing software, computers, servers and technology systems to maintain operational efficacy or mitigate security vulnerabilities.

While simple in nature, most growing businesses struggle to identify critical patch updates, test and install patch releases to fix problems as they occur. In fact, the average time to patch is 102 days according to Ponemon.

It’s no surprise that with over 16,500 security vulnerabilities reported in 2018, it’s virtually impossible for a small or medium-sized business with strained IT resources to keep up and protect your company. Patch management is a time consuming and often misunderstood task, yet the impact can have devastating effects:

57% of cyberattack victims stated that applying a patch would have prevented the attack. 34% say they knew about the vulnerability before the attack.

The window between the disclosure of a vulnerability and exploitation has shortened forcing companies to race and deploy a patch before cybercriminals can compromise systems.