4 Patch Management Practices To Keep Your Clients Secure

By Vernon Southmayd, Senior Product Manager, LabTech

As an IT professional, patching is both a mandate to secure systems with known vulnerabilities and a risk that can bring down those systems if you deploy a bad patch. In order to maintain the proper risk balance you should primarily patch to close vulnerabilities and, to a lesser degree, add new features to existing applications. Once you establish your risk balance you are continually under the threat of the latest CNN story about a latest vulnerability and the new unexpected patch that must be deployed to close it.  Building repeatable processes that solve this security/availability balance is key to keeping your systems secure and staying out in front of those news events when they happen.

Here are four things you need to solve for to be ready:

1. Third-Party Applications. Hacking has evolved from a personal crime to an organized business that is looking for the fastest way to exploit as many systems as possible.  Cybercrooks target vulnerabilities in commonly deployed applications like Java, Flash, iTunes, and Reader as an easy ways to infect large numbers of systems. Secunia’s 2014 Vulnerability Review calls out that 76 percent of vulnerabilities are related to third-party applications, outnumbering Microsoft applications such as Office (16 percent) and Windows (8 percent). Solving for third-party applications is a critical part of your overall patching strategy to prevent common attacks such as CryptoLocker.

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