Patch Management and its Importance in the IT Security Field

Fixing the vulnerability before they are exploited. Previously organizations are used Information Technology (IT) for the sake to reduce their cost, automate the system and to increase the profitability; but an insecure IT infrastructure can increase their cost and reduce the profitability, imagine a malware attack. It takes time, effort and money to investigate a hacking attack and to implement the countermeasures to avoid any attack in future; preemptive strike or proactive approach is the decent way to avoid any attack, you can call it Patch Management.

What is Patch Management ?

Let's consider a scenario, an organization that creates software; has created an outstanding software to be deployed in banks. The functionality of the software is to connect online banking system with local server where every information of the customer being stored; a black-hat hacker has found vulnerability on the created software and this vulnerability may put the data at high risk. The organization that created this software got to know about vulnerability and released a piece of code to fix this vulnerability. Now this piece of code will be used by the IT department in banks, the process to use the code is called Patching and the overall workflow is called Patch Management.

Patch management is a process that must be done routinely and should be as all-encompassing as possible to be most effective. In a network of hundreds of systems, all it takes is one machine to become compromised to open the door for multiple other machines to be compromised as well.

This is not to say that all systems should be treated equally; each company should prioritize its assets and protect the most critical ones first. But that being said, it is important to ensure patching eventually takes place on all machines and not just the most valuable to the company.

Importance of Patch Management

Patching has become a crucial part of the Information Security process, it ensures the security of the IT infrastructure from the known and discovered vulnerabilities. Apart from this, patch management also enhances the performance and productivity of the software, by keeping an eye on the latest updates and happenings in the respective software industry.

If you are an IT administrator, Penetration tester or working in a similar position; and willing to secure your IT infrastructure then a smart patch management software is therefore, very importantfor your work process. In this regard, monitoring is very important and manually you cannot perform monitoring of your network, and the combination of systems, hence a patch management software can do the job and create reports to automate the tasks.

Before going to conclude, I would like to make a clear line between an IT structure having patch management and the one without patch management. The difference is understood, the one without patch management is the vulnerable IT infrastructure; and as a result it increases the maintenance cost. To avoid your organization from these hurdles, use an intelligent patch management software that has the capabilities to perform the intended job.