Effective Patch Management - Nine Simple (but Critical) Tips

As intrusion points continue to expand in scope, making malicious attacks ubiquitous and harder to prevent than ever, an effective patch management strategy might appear the first line of defense in building endpoint security. However, the complexity and scope of the task has often undermined its success. Patch management can also seem like a massive, endless burden: patch management can easily consume huge amounts of time and money, yet informal, ad hoc patching without a central patch strategy often fails to deliver what patching is supposed to deliver—a safe, secure and available IT infrastructure.

After reading this paper you will be able to:

• Eliminate network vulnerabilities
• Deploy patches in an orderly and controlled fashion
• Improve regulatory compliance

With just a few practices and capabilities, patch management can actually become an easily executed task. We value your time and have provided a snippet of the content you will receive inside of this white paper, including more detail on effective patching and tip number 3.

In this paper, we’ll review nine simple tips that can make patch management simpler, more effective and less expensive.

1. Know your Network
2. Scan and Assess
3. Rely on a Single Source for Patches

One way to increase your patch management workload and overhead is to rely on multiple point solutions for patch deployment. That might include one patch solution for Microsoft updates, another for Adobe, a third for Mac OS patches, and yet another for other applications. 

As an example, many Microsoftcentric organizations often rely on Microsoft’s free WSUS product to deploy Microsoftissued patches for their Microsoft software and operating systems. But how do you handle patches for other critical software?

The reality is that organizations are faced with patching not only Windows operating systems and applications, but also other vendor and custom applications that WSUS cannot address. Furthermore, solutions like WSUS do not consolidate nor centralize the management of mixed systems and applications, the needed patch deployments and the associated maintenance tools. Nor do they have the ability to discover blind spots that are not being managed.

The result is a point product or products with a fragmented approach to vulnerability management, and an overall lack of visibility of the patching and risk posture. In addition, every time you bring a new solution or process into your environment, you have to learn its procedures and techniques, deal with its maintenance, and so on.

We hope you enjoyed a small piece of the content that you will receive by signing in or completing the form on the right.  You will receive access to the rest of this content and many other resources. You can also learn more about our Systems Management Appliances to help secure your network-connected devices and more efficiently service end-user systems.