Businesses today face a lot of threats from cyber criminals. With over 20 billion devices to protect globally, IT and security teams are finding it ever more difficult to keep up with fixing new and existing vulnerabilities. This gap has resulted in data breaches, ransomware attacks, compliance fines, and sometimes financial loss.
With a whopping $8 trillion dollars lost to cybercrime as of the end of 2021, it has become increasingly important for organizations not only to take patch management seriously but to ensure that the right processes, procedures, strategies, and tools are in place so that every device that accesses a corporate network is updated regularly.
What is Patch Management?
Patch management involves acquiring, testing, and deploying a series of patches or code changes to administered computers. The essence of deploying patches to a computer includes adding new features and fixing bugs or vulnerabilities. Patches can be deployed to applications, middleware, or even operating systems.
Why is Patch Management important?
The importance of having a robust patch management process in an organization includes:
1. Reducing your attack Surface
Over 90% of all network security breaches can be traced back to software or hardware flaws caused by missing patches (FBI, 2021). An effective patch management strategy will ensure that every device that has access to network resources is adequately and timely patched. This can help to mitigate risk, including zero-day and known vulnerabilities. Furthermore, good patch management practices will also help reduce the downtime of your servers.
2. Adding New Features
Beyond fixing bugs and vulnerabilities, software vendors or developers sometimes develop new updates to add new features to their applications. By keeping your endpoints and applications up-to-date, you can take advantage of new features added by the software maker(s).
3. Make sure every application works.
Failure to deploy patches on time can cause some applications to not work correctly. This may lead to a loss of productivity and pressure on the application managers. To avoid this, it is important to ensure that patches are deployed as and when due.
4. Meeting Compliance and Avoiding Fines
Businesses are required to comply with regulations such as PCI DSS, NDLP, and many others. No matter the compliance, regularly patching your systems is always a key component that your auditor wants to see. Therefore, to comply with these standards and avoid fines, it is important to put in place a thorough patch management process.
Tips on how to Develop a Patch Management Strategy
- Have a dedicated patch management team.
In order to ensure that every device is updated and on time, it is important to have a team whose job descriptions are tied to patch management. In most organizations, patch management is often left to the system administrators or the IT security team members. While this is not entirely bad, creating a sub-team that focuses solely on patching will lead to more efficiency in the patching process.
- Have an IT inventory System
There is a popular saying in IT that you cannot manage what you can’t see, and this is true. For your patch management to be effective, you have to have an inventory system that tells you how many systems you have, their types, the applications running on them, the end of life of the software and hardware, and other similar information. This insight is important to enabling your patch management team to know where to focus their attention.
- Invest in a good patch management solution.
With the rising number of devices on various corporate networks, some on the cloud, some on-premise, running on different operating systems and expecting different types of updates and patches, it has become very clear that the manual patch management process is no longer effective. So, it is important for organizations to invest in patch management tools that will assist them in automating their patch management lifecycle.
What are the Factors to consider when choosing a patch management solution?
With various OEMs coming up with different patch management solutions, organizations are often confused about what to look for when shopping for a patch management solution. The following should guide you when evaluating competing solutions for your patch management needs.
OS Agnostic
A good patch management solution should be able to support all or most operating systems out of the box, including Windows, all distros of Linux (Red Hat, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, etc), AIX, and others. You don’t need two or more solutions for patch management, nor do you need to leave some assets unpatched because your tool can’t handle them. A good patch management solution should also be able to deploy patches for third-party apps like Java, OpenSSL, and so on.
Support for Cloud Assets
Most organizations today now have most or a good number of their servers hosted on the public cloud, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. So, it’s important to make sure that the patch management solution you choose can help you deploy patches to these assets that are hosted in the cloud.
Automatic discovery of missing patches
A good patch management system should be able to discover the missing patches on every endpoint without the administrator initiating manual patching. This will save you a lot of time and ensure that new vulnerabilities are quickly discovered and remediated.
Simplicity
The essence of technology is to make life easier. A good patch management solution should be easy to navigate and carry out your day-to-day tasks. The solution should be easy to administer. This makes knowledge transfer easier when a patch management analyst leaves or changes roles.
Reporting
A good patch management solution should have a good reporting capability that allows you to pull out periodic patch compliance reports for management use.
Patch Management services provided by ActivEdge
ActivEdge Technologies Ltd, a Pan-African IT consulting company, has helped many organizations in the planning, strategy development, and solution selection of their patch management process. These organizations include First Bank of Nigeria, AXA-Mansard Insurance, and Meristem Securities. We have been able to help these organizations achieve the following:
Improve security and reduce attack surfaces.
Our automated patch management solution has ensured that patches are deployed immediately when they are available across all devices, no matter their operating system and connection type (on the network or off the network, cloud, and on-premise).
Enhance Productivity.
Our solution and strategy for these organizations have reduced the time of vulnerability discovery and remediation from weeks to hours. With our solution, these organizations achieve an over 90% patch success rate at first deployment.
Deploy only pre-tested patches
Our solution ensures that only pre-tested patches are released to the customers for deployment to their assets. This stops problems like software that doesn’t work well together, patches that break applications and having to roll back patches that have already been installed.
Support their complex, distributed environment
Our solution has enabled these organizations to adequately deploy patches to every asset in their corporate networks. First Bank of Nigeria, for instance, leverages our solution to manage assets across all its subsidiaries worldwide, including their distributed Automated Teller Machines. Meristem leverages our solution to deploy patches to off-the-network devices to staff that works from home without needing a VPN. All these are achieved on a lean infrastructure of one server that can support as many as 250,000 devices and an agent that uses less than 3% CPU when active.
Let’s help you plan your patch deployment strategy.
With our experience of working with different clients over the years, we understand the challenges of most organizations when it comes to patch management, and we are ready to assist you in getting all your assets patched regularly and raising your patch compliance.
Talk to us today and join the rising number of our satisfied clients.
