Patch Management Policy

Overview of Patch Management Policy

Patch management helps IT teams eliminate bugs, promote productivity, and respond fast to known exploits. Intel vPro® Enterprise for Windows OS streamlines and helps simplify patching with remote management capabilities that work whether systems are inside or beyond the firewall—offering enormous value for businesses with remote workers.

What Is Patch Management?

Patch management is the process of applying updates to software, drivers, and firmware to protect against vulnerabilities. Effective patch management also helps ensure the best operating performance of systems, boosting productivity.

Whether it’s an employee laptop or a userless PC-based device, such as a kiosk or digital signage, all systems need to be secured. The risks of ignoring patch management can include exposing your business to leaks and breaches, loss of productivity, and loss of reputation.

Benefits: Why Is Patch Management Important?

The ultimate goal of patch management is to protect your endpoints from hackers and keep your systems running in top-notch shape. But patch management also confers a number of other benefits:

  • Promote productivity within the organization. Viewing patch management as a trade-off against productivity is a common misconception. Software that is well-managed with up-to-date patches works better and can help boost employee productivity.
  • Help lower the cost of device lifecycle management and repair. The office is everywhere, and businesses have had to pivot quickly to support a highly dispersed workforce. Remote management tools extend the abilities of IT, lowering the need for costly hardware shipments or truck rolls.
  • Help meet laws, regulations, and compliance standards. Many businesses must satisfy local or federal regulations in protecting data. These may include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for patient records, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for personal information collected during customer interactions, and similar regulations.
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Patch Management Best Solutions

Here are a few steps that IT admins can take to lead patch management best practices in their organization:

  • Know that patch management is more than just updating the operating system (OS) and applications. Patch management extends to updating your hardware’s firmware and drivers. Threats to the full computing stack do exist, and Intel is taking an active role in helping you mitigate these vulnerabilities. Industry leadership is key, as Intel works directly with OEMs, software vendors, and operating system partners to ensure that firmware updates are incorporated into larger software patch deployments.
  • Routinize patch management. Make your patch management cycles known and predictable to your entire organization. With an established cadence, users can prepare for a patch cycle accordingly and lessen the impact it has on their productivity.
  • Patch in batches. This is also known as conducting a “soft launch” or “sandbox testing.” It is considered good practice to launch a patch to a small segment of users (around 5 percent) and evaluate the effects before a broad-scale launch to your entire user base.
  • Understand who is responsible for patch management. It’s typically the responsibility of the software or system provider to patch a known vulnerability. IT managers must ensure patches provided by OEMs and software vendors are deployed across the business network of systems and devices. At smaller businesses, patch management usually falls into the hands of the individual user. Most software is programmed to notify a user that it needs to be updated. It may even have the ability to update itself automatically at a prescheduled time.
  • Scale deployments with patch management systems. A patch management system is software specifically designed to help IT departments orchestrate and track patch versioning and deployments across a network. PCs built on Intel vPro® feature integration with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM) to enable remote management features for business-class fleet control. This helps extend patch management capabilities and increases the availability of endpoint devices for updates.
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