Why Patch Management is Important and How to Get It Right

Businesses face several threats from cybercriminals, but several companies struggle to patch and fix vulnerabilities fast enough. As a result, it leads to a risk of data breaches, ransomware attacks and host of resultant operational and possible legal consequences.

The IT team must have processes to prioritize the risks and streamline the patch management process. It mitigates data breach risks if the patches are deployed quickly. However, handling patches for thousands of devices across the company can be cumbersome. It is where automated patch management solutions can help.

What Is Patch Management?

Software is periodically updated to add new features, fix bugs and other vulnerabilities. Patch management involves managing the computers across the enterprise and keeping them up to date. Patches are made available for off-the-shelf applications, middleware, and operating systems. In addition, in-house developed applications are also updated and patched.

Are you aware that you can automate the entire patch management process?

An automated patch management solution can help reduce the time and effort required for installing the software updates and patches. It can minimize problems resulting from manual processes and improve IT staff productivity. Automation enables IT staff to focus more on other potentially more important activities.

The Importance of Patch Management

Cyberthreats and attacks are on the rise. Securing computing devices across the enterprise is a business imperative. However, patching is time-consuming and challenging, especially when organizations have multiple tools, multiple operating platforms and different patch teams. An effective patch management solution and process has many benefits, such as:

Mitigating Security Risks

Automated patch management systems can mitigate security risks that creep in when the patch updates are manual or are in-consistently applied. They can also mitigate the risk from zero-day and known exploited vulnerabilities. In addition, an effective patch management solution also reduces downtime of servers and end-user computing devices.

Leveraging New Features

Beyond patching, software upgrades can provide new features that could be levered by both users and IT staff. Upgrades can increase productivity and enable new capabilities that deliver greater business value.

Ensuring Applications Work Properly

Not applying patches in a timely fashion may cause applications not to work correctly. This may lead to lost productivity and create an unnecessary burden on service desk personnel. Therefore, it is better to apply patches and software updates whenever they are available.

Maintaining Compliance, Avoiding Non-compliance Penalties

Businesses in different industries or in different geographies may need to adhere to multiple regulations, like the GDPR and PCI. Effective patching and vulnerability remediation are necessary to stay compliant with these regulations and enactments.

Benefits of Automated Patch Management

Automation is key to keeping a fleet of endpoints patched and updated. With BigFix automation, organizations can:

Improve Security

Automated patch management ensures that all devices and systems across the organization are automatically updated. You can schedule the batch delivery as soon as the patches are available. In addition, a cloud-native solution can assure the protection of remotely located components.

Enhance Productivity

Managing and deploying patches across the organization can be challenging and time consuming. By leveraging an automated and integrated solution like BigFix, organizations can reduce overall endpoint management effort. In fact, when organizations consolidate tools using BigFix, organizations can often recapture 50-60% of the effort spent in endpoint management activities. As a result, IT organizations can have resources to dedicate to higher value tasks and tackle backlogged projects. An automated solution can remove the manual steps to enhance IT team productivity. The application can perform systematic checks and then download the patches.

Improve Service Level Agreement (SLA) Compliance

Global organizations have stringent IT policies requiring KPI-based processes to ensure data security. They must download the patches within a definite timeline from when it is available. Advanced solutions can provide patch status over intuitive dashboards.

Implement Continuous Patching

Using BigFix Patch Policies, organizations can implement continuous patching. Continuous patching shrink patch cycles and improving productivity of IT patch staff. For more information, read the blog, Understanding BigFix: The Premier Endpoint Patch Solution.

Discover Unmanaged Devices

Unmanaged, rogue devices can present a serious security threat. Using BigFix, organizations will automatically see IP-addressable devices that are not under BigFix management allowing IT to investigate and quickly bring these devices under BigFix management.

Download Ready-to-deploy, Pre-tested Content

The BigFix Content Delivery System provides ready-to-deploy, pretested patch content that minimizes the burden of packaging and testing patches. BigFix delivers content for nearly 100 different operating system variants and hundreds of third-party applications. This helps patch teams be eliminating development and testing time so that vulnerabilities can be remediated before they are exploited. IT organizations get content automatically downloaded by subscribing to one or more Content Sites. For a complete list of supported software, visit, https://www.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/supported-software.

Conclusion

With the constant barrage of patches by all software vendors, it’s no wonder that IT organizations struggle to keep up. Automation is pivotal to keeping up with all available patches. Customers use HCL BigFix Patch to keep over one hundred million endpoints continuously patched. It can deliver >98% first-pass patch success rate, decreasing your patch cycle time and effort, improving the productivity of IT staff, and decreasing security risk.

BigFix provides visibility and control of every endpoint in the enterprise, regardless of the operating system, location, or connection. It provides a single, comprehensive endpoint management solution for Windows, Windows IoT, UNIX, Linux, macOS, iOS, Raspberry Pi, and Android. BigFix is a comprehensive, integrated solution for patch management, software deployment, OS deployment and upgrades, inventory management, mobile and modern device management, compliance management, and vulnerability remediation. BigFix also patches systems that are on-premise, in the cloud, at home, or roaming.

Contact us for further details about leveraging the power of BigFix to optimize your endpoint management solution and processes.