Microsoft and third-party vendors frequently release patches and security fixes to address vulnerabilities, enhance functionality, and ensure their software operates efficiently. Manually tracking, testing, validating, prioritizing, and deploying them on hundreds of computers is time-consuming for large enterprises. Additionally, manual auditing for patch compliance and maintaining the reports adds to the workload.
Automatic patch deployment reduces the time IT teams spend manually applying patches as all the above processes occur from a centralized console to all endpoints without human intervention; freeing up their time for strategic work, leading to better resource allocation and increased productivity. Rather than manually auditing each endpoint, you can also schedule customized reports for each process and troubleshoot any failure that arises.
Follow these best practices for automatic patch management to enhance the security, reliability, and efficiency of your enterprise systems.
Deploying certain patches before prior testing may affect the functionality or even bring down an endpoint.To prevent this, test patches in a pilot group of endpoints (a test environment) before deploying them across the network. The test environment should mirror your actual network and must include all operating systems used by your enterprise. Once patches are tested and found stable in the test environment, you can approve and deploy them using automate patch deployment across the network.
To learn more about test and approval of patches refer to this page.
Once the released patches are successfully tested and approved, prioritize patches and schedule their deployment to systems accordingly. Follow the critical-first approach for prioritization. These are some critical first approach methods: Give high priority to the patches with severity classified as Critical or Important for both testing and deployment. Patch the systems with high vulnerability, Business-critical endpoints, and internet-facing devices without any delay. Deploy patches of moderate or low severity and patch less vulnerable systems according to regular scheduled maintenance windows.
It is vital to patch systems promptly, as tens of thousands of vulnerabilities are recorded each year. Also, vendors like Firefox and Chrome release their patches every week to mitigate vulnerabilities. To tackle all these issues and stay on the top of your patching game, a well-organized approach is to schedule automated patch deployments twice weekly. By doing so, you can manage and monitor endpoints to check for patch compliance and ensure that your systems are patched with all the latest updates.
To learn more about automate patch deployment tasks, refer to this page.
Create different groups of computers based on domains, Operating Systems, the presence of specific hardware and certain applications, and configure a patch configuration individually for each group customized to suit their needs. You can also customize the deployment policy accordingly. Some configurations that you can use while creating groups to suit your business needs are: Deployment based on Patch Tuesday schedules. Groups based on critical business machines and servers and less critical business machines and servers. Grouping based on usage and non-working hours.
To learn more about creating deployment policies refer to this page.
Not only patch compliance but also user productivity is essential for the well-being of the enterprise. To ensure users are not interrupted while working on business-critical tasks on their systems, allowing user intervention to skip or delay deployment or rebooting is crucial.To ensure patches are applied, you can notify users about rebooting after a specified interval or force reboot if necessary.
Not only zero-days but also a known vulnerability may result in a data breach. Hence, it is recommended regularly patching for all the vulnerabilities, not just for zero-days.
Scheduling and generating detailed reports on the entire patch management process ensures visibility into the patching process and is useful for network compliance and audits. In addition to monitoring the patching status across the network, you can also track the vulnerabilities mitigated with regular reports.
To learn more about audits and reports refer to this page.
