Mac patch management involves managing your macOS endpoints by gathering a complete list of all the missing patches through a scan, downloading the missing patches, testing them in non-production machines, and finally rolling them out into the production environment for deployment. Patching your Mac devices a.k.a Mac patching enhances the security level of your macOS environment.
This document talks about the following:
The use of Mac operating systems in enterprises has been growing at a faster rate in recent years. With limited manpower, IT teams find it a challenge to patch all Mac security updates and third-party updates manually. This highlights the need for a Mac patch management tool.
Patch Manager Plus detects macOSs that require a patch to fix a vulnerability and groups the patches by severity ranging from critical to low. With Patch Manager Plus, you can quickly assess the health of your IT environment by glancing at the System Health Policy. You can patch critical vulnerabilities either through Manual Deployment or by using the Automated Patch Deployment feature.
Learn more about configuring Mac agents with Patch Manager Plus.
Patch Manager Plus supports supports macOS patch management for the following versions:
Note:
* OS marked as EOL by the vendor. Hence, we don't support patching for these versions.
You can effectively perform macOS patch management either by deploying patches manually or by automating this process using a patch management solution. However, always make sure that the patches are tested thoroughly in a test environment before deploying them to your production environment.
You can configure patch management for Mac devices and manually deploy patches seamlessly to your Mac machines by going to the App Store and checking for new updates. If your computer is updated to the latest version of macOS, the store will display a message telling you that your computer is up-to-date. If there are any missing updates, you'll get a pop-up asking if you would like to install the updates now.
You can choose the option that best suits you. Please note that when you want to download third-party updates for Mac, you have two ways of doing it:
Manual deployment can often be tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming. For example, let's say you have 1,000 systems in your network and a patch needs to be downloaded for every computer. Can you imagine the bandwidth this would consume? This is where automation comes in handy.
Patch Manager Plus is a software patching tool that offers complete automation with its Automated Patch Deployment (APD) feature.
Patch Manager Plus provides unified, real-time visibility, management, and deployment of patches to all Mac endpoints from a single console. This Mac patch management software provides you with a complete list of inventories on the missing patches, and it allows you to decide how and when you wish to deploy them with the deployment policies feature. So, you can customize deployment based on what works best for you. By providing complete automation, your Mac clients can stay up-to-date with the latest Mac security updates for macOS and applications.
Tips to perform an effective Mac patching:
Explore a fully-featured online demo of our patch management software. This demo version gives you insights on the different modules of our patching tool.
Some of the benefits of using Patch Manager Plus are:
View the full list of Mac applications supported by Patch Manager Plus.
macOS patch management involves managing your macOS endpoints by gathering a complete list of all the missing patches through a scan, downloading the missing patches, testing them in non-production machines, and finally rolling them out into the production environment for deployment.
The latest Mac update is macOS Ventura - 13 which has been released on October 24, 2022.
You can patch macOS devices either by manually deploying the updates or by automating the patch management workflow with a automated patch management solution such as Patch Manager Plus.
You can deploy patches manually to your Mac machines by going to the App Store and checking for new updates. If your computer is updated to the latest version of macOS, the store will display a message stating that your computer is up-to-date.
If there are any missing updates, you'll get a pop-up asking if you would like to install the updates now.