Patch Management Software

There’s no such thing as perfect software. All software is a work in progress. This is true of all software, whether it’s an early beta release—and is expected to have bugs—or is the latest production version of a widely used platform.

When problems are discovered post-release, vendors issue software patches to fix them. Patches are updates to the software’s underlying code made to repair functionality or fix security vulnerabilities. Since they’re issued in response to freshly discovered problems and newly created vulnerabilities, their release doesn’t follow any predictable schedule. As a further complication, the management and installation of patches is the responsibility of the end-user.

Patch management software helps IT teams monitor and manage the deployment of software patches. In this Buyer’s Guide, we discuss:

What Is Patch Management Software?
Common Features of Patch Management Software
Benefits of Patch Management Software
Patch Management Software Best Practices

What Is Patch Management Software?

IT departments—even in SMBs that may only have an IT department of one or two people—have been patching software for as long as they’ve been around. Patching software is, in fact, one of the central operations required to keep a company’s IT both up and running as well as safe and secure.

To that last point, it’s been estimated that “99% of exploits are based on vulnerabilities that have already been known to security and IT professionals for at least one year.” (It's Time to Align Your Vulnerability Management Priorities With the Biggest Threats, Gartner, available to clients.) Only when the vulnerabilities are successfully patched can the risk of falling victim to an exploit be minimized.

Patch management software is designed to simplify and automate various aspects of the patch deployment and monitoring process. It addresses patch management for a variety of IT components, including individual endpoints, servers and network applications.

Because IT varies widely between verticals and company size-tiers, patch management software comes in many shapes and sizes. It’s not uncommon for an enterprise to have several IT teams and find each using different patch management software.

While SMBs have simpler, more focused patch management software needs, they must still search within a highly fragmented and complex patch management software market to find the solution that best meets their needs.

Common Features of Patch Management Software

This section highlights the central applications of patch management software and provides a good place to begin your search.

Benefits of Patch Management Software

While we touched on some of the benefits of patch management software in the sections above, here we’ll lay them out in a more organized fashion.

Improved IT security: Improved IT security across endpoints, databases and internal networks is the most significant benefit of a successful patch management software deployment. Note that patch management software doesn’t make IT security software unnecessary, but it can improve its effectiveness.

Better system stability: Patches do more than just fix security vulnerabilities, they can also restore functionality, prevent errors and ensure that production IT equipments always runs at full capacity. Better systems stability is a benefit that all IT users can appreciate.

Time savings: Deploying patches manually can be extremely time consuming. Patch management software greatly reduces this burden. It also saves time for IT end-users by reducing the need for lengthy update processes, re-installations and reduces the need for damage control following a malware infection.

Keep in mind, however, that these benefits are contingent upon proper selection and implementation of patch management software. Some tips for this are in the following section.

Patch Management Software Best Practices

As with all software, the success of a patch management software implementation depends upon accurate alignment with company-wide goals. Additionally, consider the following best practices when planning your company’s implementation:

• Avoid using heavily automated patching until you have well-defined standards and process. Haphazard use of automated patching can lead to system instability.
• IT configurations should be tracked or monitored to prevent configuration drift, a problem in which the configuration of production IT grows apart from the configuration of backup and secondary systems.
• Patch management may require occasional cooperation from staff outside the IT department to, for example, test recently patched applications or avoid using certain applications during scheduled patch maintenance windows.
• Cloud-deployed software is typically patched by the software vendor, not end-users, so can be a good alternative if patch management becomes too much of a burden.

Patch management can be a significant burden on IT departments, but given the myriad risks associated with using unpatched software, it’s a necessary burden. Careful patch management software selection and implementation can greatly reduce that burden without introducing extra complications.