Patches are for more than torn clothes. Patching your operating systems and applications (that is to say: installing minor security updates and bug fixes as they’re released) is important for maintaining security and efficiency across an organization, and keeping your patches fully up to date is vital for regulatory and security compliance.
Cyber threats are constantly growing and seeking new vulnerabilities to exploit. As such, patch compliance is essential for keeping them out, not to mention meeting regulatory requirements. Yet in a world of hybrid/remote work and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, patching can be an unexpected challenge.
With that in mind, it’s time to look at patch compliance and why it matters. We’ll explore the importance of patch compliance, the challenges it presents, best practices for keeping your patches updated, measured, and reported, and how Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management) can simplify and automate patching across all your endpoints.
What is Patch Compliance?
Patch compliance is the act of keeping devices updated to meet defined patch policies and deadlines. Whenever a new patch is released, companies and IT teams should ensure the update rolls out across all their devices, keeping their endpoints and networks secure and compliant. If a company falls behind on its patches or neglects its devices, it’ll fail to meet its compliance requirements.
This applies to both operating systems and applications. Even if your OS is fully up-to-date, an unpatched app can still present security vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Compliance as a Metric and as a Process
When examining patch compliance, it is essential to understand the process involved in rolling out patches, as well as the metrics that track their rollout.
When compliance is viewed as a metric, organizations examine the percentage of their endpoints that meet their compliance policy within a specified time frame. This includes the number of endpoints that need to be updated (both remote and in-office), as well as the time required to roll out updates across each device, to ensure the patch rollout is progressing promptly.
However, organizations also need to consider the process of rolling out patches. Proper patch management isn’t just a matter of automatically installing updates as soon as they’re available – it also requires testing, approving, deploying, and verifying patches as outlined by company policy. This process is important, as it ensures patches work properly, don’t cause any unexpected compatibility issues, and are properly installed across your environment.
In short, the process ensures patches are safely and completely installed, while the metrics track how many endpoints are fully patched within a time frame.
Examples of Patch Compliance in Practice
With that said, it can help to know what patch compliance looks like in action. Businesses will have different compliance policies based on factors such as size, IT resources, security regulations, and so forth.
For instance, businesses may set policies that determine how quickly patches must be deployed across their endpoints. This can specify guidelines like “critical patches must be fully deployed within seven days,” while giving more wiggle room for patches that only include minor improvements or updates. Doing so helps IT teams understand what to prioritize so they can allocate their resources appropriately.
Additionally, patch compliance policies can also set guidelines regarding which devices are the most critical and should be prioritized. For instance, servers and other critical devices should be prioritized and patched as quickly as possible, while low-risk devices can wait until the more pressing updates are finished.
Why Patch Compliance Matters
There may be some who wonder why patch compliance is all that important. Patches, by their nature, are small updates designed to address one or two things, unlike larger updates that can bring larger changes. Neglecting patch compliance, however, is a big mistake.
Patch compliance is vital for multiple reasons, including:
Security Risk Reduction
Keeping devices and applications up to date is important for security, as many patches are designed to fix vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. In fact, unpatched software is the top attack vector hackers use to break into devices.
By providing regular patches and updates, businesses can ensure their apps and endpoints remain secure, and any potential vulnerabilities are addressed as quickly as possible. Fast and timely patching lowers the exposure windows, giving hackers fewer opportunities to strike and protecting vulnerable systems.
Compliance and Regulatory Alignment
Many security frameworks and regulations require timely patching, including PCI DSS, DORA, ISO, NIS2, and HIPAA. If your security audit shows you’ve been leaving endpoints unpatched and vulnerable, you’re likely to fail and be hit with a hefty fine.
Regulatory compliance audits have strict expectations that businesses must meet. Security audits systematically evaluate all of a business’s systems, procedures, and security policies to ensure it’s meeting each of these expectations and is properly vigilant when identifying and addressing potential threats or vulnerabilities.
Audits can include risk and vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, configuration audits, and, of course, compliance audits. Compliance audits evaluate how well your security aligns with industry regulations and standards, as well as identify areas for improvement. This includes technical evaluation, analyzing documentation, and speaking with key personnel, as well as conducting tests to assess the effectiveness of the organization’s security.
If a company’s audit reveals that its endpoints are using outdated operating systems or applications, especially versions with known security vulnerabilities, that is a massive strike against the business. Patch compliance helps maintain cybersecurity, enabling organizations to meet their regulatory requirements.
Business Continuity and User Experience
Whether patches are designed to address vulnerabilities, fix bugs, or provide minor improvements, they all lead to a better user experience. Proper patching can reduce outages and incidents while improving performance, so employees across the company work more efficiently and spend less time asking the IT department for help. This, in turn, frees up IT resources so that agents can focus on more pressing matters.
Good patch management can also reduce disruptions throughout the patching process. While updating operating systems and applications can be disruptive when they’re launched in the middle of the workday, patch automation and scheduling can ensure they’re installed at a convenient time, minimizing disruptions while keeping endpoints up-to-date.
Reputation and Customer Trust
What happens when an unpatched system leads to a data breach? The damages go far beyond the initial losses. Not only will companies lose vital data, time recovering, and money, but the breaches can cause significant damage to a business’s reputation and customer trust.
When a company suffers a breach, especially one caused by lax security or missing patches, it deals a huge blow to its credibility. Customers will feel less confident when dealing with that organization, and will be more hesitant to trust it with their business.
On the other hand, patching discipline signals that businesses take security seriously and maintain high security standards. This puts customers at ease when working with them, improving trust and reputation, which can lead to more business opportunities.
Top Challenges for Patch Compliance
While patch compliance is essential, several challenges and obstacles can make it more difficult. Organizations and IT leaders should be aware of these challenges so they’ll know what to expect and can be prepared to tackle them.
Common patch compliance challenges include:
Incomplete or Inaccurate Device Inventory
Do you have a proper inventory of all your devices? Forgotten, neglected, or unmanaged devices create blind spots, which can go unpatched and create huge security risks. Accurate, real-time asset lists are important for monitoring your inventory and ensuring all your devices are updated and accounted for. Otherwise, your older, forgotten devices can provide hackers with an easy point of entry into your systems.
Remote and Offline Endpoints
Maintaining remote devices is as essential as on-premises endpoints. However, without the right software, patching and updating remote devices can be a challenge. Even local devices can be left offline during maintenance windows when patches roll out, causing them to be skipped.
Fortunately, these obstacles can be addressed with the right patch management solutions. With remote endpoint management solutions, you can automate patch updates across remote devices, schedule updates for the most convenient times, and set retry strategies to install patches on devices that may have been offline during the scheduled time.
Manual Workflows and Human Error
Mistakes can happen, especially with large projects that require repetitive manual labor. Manually deploying patches across large and distributed endpoint environments is prone to human error and can be a slow, time-consuming process.
When IT agents need to install patches one-by-one, device-by-device, it can take ages to update every endpoint, and there’s no consistent cadence to the updates. Even with detailed spreadsheets, it can be easy to miss or skip some devices, and there’s no easy way to monitor each device’s installation progress should anything go wrong.
This can lead to delays, missed devices, and failed updates, all of which create massive security vulnerabilities. Patch updates must be efficient across endpoints, which can’t be done when IT agents must manually update every device – automation tools are essential for a smooth and complete patch deployment.
Visibility and Reporting Gaps
Without full visibility into your endpoints, you’re flying blind. IT teams need dashboards and alerts that can display the status of their patches, if there are any failures (and why), and if they have any aging updates in need of repair.
Without proper visibility, it's easy to miss failed updates, skipped devices, or any other issues that may occur. A single missed endpoint can create a vulnerability that hackers can exploit, creating significant risks for the entire company. As such, it’s vital to use endpoint management software that provides a clear, precise look into each of your endpoints from a single dashboard.
Change Control and Maintenance Windows
While updates are important, they can often be pushed back to avoid interrupting work. It’s important to balance uptime and timely patching to keep devices secure without locking users out of their devices during updates, which can be tricky without automated patch management tools.
With proper patch management solutions, you can coordinate and automate patch installations to schedule them for times when they won’t interrupt work. This minimizes the impact on employees without leaving devices vulnerable, so end users can work efficiently without being interrupted by updates.
Legacy Systems and Third-Party Apps
One often unexpected challenge in patching comes from compatibility issues with older systems or third-party applications. Legacy systems can rely on software that’s no longer supported or receives delayed patches, leaving the systems more vulnerable as time goes by. Additionally, sometimes patches can make a small but important change that can make software and applications incompatible, hence the need for testing before patches roll out across a larger environment.
Unsupported software, patch delays, and compatibility issues can all cause significant risks and setbacks. It’s important to utilize compensating controls to remediate these vulnerabilities and meet your security compliance requirements, as well as prioritize updates and maintenance for your devices and their security.
8 Patch Compliance Best Practices
Fortunately, there are ways to help ensure proper patch compliance without spending excessive time or interrupting work. Following these best practices can guide your IT teams through a smooth, efficient, and time-effective patch deployment, keeping endpoints fully updated and security at its best.
1. Maintain a Complete, Real-Time Inventory
Maintaining an accurate inventory is one of the most important actions you can take to ensure patch compliance. This requires tracking data for your devices, their operating systems (including OS versions), and the last time the devices checked in. With those data points, you can accurately monitor and manage your endpoints to make sure each one is up to date.
In addition, you should consistently check for patches and compare your inventory to make sure you haven’t missed a patch. Continuous discovery is the key to ensuring an up-to-date endpoint inventory and maintaining a clear record for audits.
2. Establish Policy and Service Levels
A clear patching policy is vital for maintaining IT compliance, security, and efficiency. With a proper policy, you can set guidelines for prioritization and risk-based timelines based on the severity of the patch and how critical the assets are, ensuring an efficient rollout that doesn’t interrupt your service levels.
Of course, these policies should also be flexible enough to adapt when an exception is needed. Implementing approval paths for these cases helps work continue unimpeded even when there’s an urgent update or a patch is causing issues.
3. Prioritize Based On Risk
Prioritizing updates is an important part of any patch management policy. Start by prioritizing the most critical patches – those that address vulnerabilities hackers are actively exploiting, fix major issues, and impact your business-critical systems. From there, you can group patch priority by business impact, starting with the updates that will have the greatest effect and moving down.
Doing so helps ensure that the most vital patches are rolled out as quickly as possible, while the less essential ones have more flexible scheduling. This enables you to work around your IT asset availability and end users’ work schedules without neglecting patches.
4. Automate Detection and Deployment
Manually monitoring for patches and installing them on every endpoint can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Fortunately, there are patch management automation tools that can automatically detect and deploy them across devices.
Automated patch management software can scan, download, and install patches on your connected endpoints, covering every step from detecting the patch to rebooting the devices after they’re installed. The right tools can even schedule patches with staggered rollouts, waiting for the optimal time before installing the patches on each device to avoid downtime and interruptions.
5. Test with Pilot Rings
While it is important to roll out updates quickly, patching shouldn’t be done recklessly either. Testing patches is essential to identify potential compatibility issues or unexpected problems that may come with the patches before they can impact a wider environment.
Testing in pilot rings is the best way to check your patches while rolling them out. This begins testing in an isolated environment (Ring 0) to check that the patch works properly and there are no immediate issues. From there, the patches are deployed to a smaller environment (Ring 1) for validation, carefully expanding to more endpoints while monitoring for any issues until it’s fully deployed.
Having a rollback plan is also important. If a patch causes unexpected issues, being able to roll back the update to a previous, unpatched version can save your endpoints and allow you to wait until the problems are fixed before deploying any updates.
6. Monitor Success and Failures with Alerts
If a patch doesn’t successfully install, you’ll need to know as quickly as possible. Using an endpoint management solution with monitoring and alerts helps ensure that you can track patch statuses across all your endpoints, so any failed patches can be addressed quickly. Otherwise, the devices might remain vulnerable, which provides cyber attackers an easy point of entry.
A good endpoint management solution provides alerts on missing patches, failed installations, and aging compliance that’s at risk of becoming outdated. These solutions can even automatically file IT support tickets or trigger workflows to ensure the patching failure is addressed promptly.
7. Handle Exceptions and Document
While patching is vital, there can be times when a patch needs to be delayed or even skipped. In these cases, having a policy for handling and documenting these exceptions is key.
These policies can help manage temporary deferrals, review dates, and find security tools to compensate for skipped updates. It’s also important to track and log these decisions, so the explanation and compensation controls are made clear during audits.
8. Report KPIs and Trend Over Time
Tracking your KPIs is important for many aspects of a business, including patch management. When you roll out a new patch, it’s important to track how quickly you can deploy them, how effectively they’re installed, and how many patches you apply each month. Tracking these can identify areas for improvement so future patch updates can be even more seamless.
It can also help to monitor your KPIs after new patches are deployed to identify any new trends, including performance improvements and any new interruptions that might need to be addressed. This can help drive improvement and keep all your data tracked and compiled into audit-ready views.
Core Patch Compliance KPIs to Track
Speaking of key performance indicators, what are the KPIs you should be tracking? Several important KPIs can show how well your patch deployment is performing, including:
Compliance rate, tracked by both severity and group
Patch deployment speed/mean time to patch
Failure rate
Devices overdue
Patch coverage rate (including both operating systems and third-party apps)
Number of patches applied
Tracking these helps IT leaders understand how effective their patch deployment policies are, potential issues that should be addressed, areas for improvement, and more.
How Splashtop AEM Helps You Achieve Patch Compliance
Patch compliance can be a challenge for the unprepared, but if you have the right tools, it’s easy to ensure all your endpoints are secure and up-to-date.
Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management) is one of the best solutions on the market for managing your disparate devices, including real-time OS and third-party patching with policy-based automation. With Splashtop AEM, you can automate updates for operating systems and third-party applications, gain insights into your patch deployments, and take control over the patches you deploy.
Splashtop AEM includes:
1. Automated OS and Third-Party App Patching
Splashtop AEM reduces the manual effort that goes into patching and delays it can cause by automating OS and third-party application patching. It automatically detects new patches for your endpoints, schedules updates, and deploys the patches at a convenient time, without requiring human intervention. This keeps endpoints and apps updated without taking time out of the workday or requiring IT agents to update every device manually.
2. Configurable Alerts for Missing or Failed Patches
If a patch is skipped or goes wrong, Splashtop AEM can ensure your IT team will be the first to know. It can send out alerts for failures, pending patches, or policy breaches, so IT agents can address the problems quickly and keep devices patched. These alerts can be sent out via email and displayed on the Splashtop AEM console, making them clearly visible and easy to manage.
3. Schedules and Maintenance Windows
Timing is everything, which is why Splashtop AEM lets users set custom schedules and maintenance windows to avoid user disruptions. This ensures updates are scheduled to a time that’s convenient for everyone, so end users won’t encounter unplanned downtime or disruptions. If the patch update fails, Splashtop AEM can automatically retry or schedule another attempt for the next convenient time.
4. Centralized Dashboard and Remote Remediation
Splashtop AEM features a user-friendly interface with a centralized dashboard. From there, IT agents can see patch statuses across all endpoints in one convenient location. If there are any issues they need to resolve, they can use remote commands and scripts to quickly fix issues, even when they’re working remotely or managing a device far away.
5. Audit-Ready Reporting
Audits can be time-consuming and exhausting, but they’re necessary nonetheless. Splashtop AEM helps make audits painless with exportable reports, including evidence of policy adherence and exception handling. This provides clear documentation showing your patch management and security, ready for audits or reports to leadership.
6. Works with Splashtop Remote Support and Splashtop Enterprise
Splashtop AEM is part of the Splashtop platform and is available as an add-on to Splashtop Remote Support and Splashtop Enterprise to unify remote access, support, and endpoint management. This provides a single platform for remote access, support, monitoring, patching, and alerts, so IT teams can easily support and manage multiple endpoints from anywhere. Your IT teams will be able to respond faster while using fewer tools, keeping devices secure, and supporting a remote environment.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Patch compliance is necessary for any business that wants to maintain cybersecurity and IT compliance. With proper patch management, you can reduce security risks, support audits, and keep operating systems and apps running at their best. Even just getting started with patch automation and dashboards that provide insights and patch status updates can help improve efficiency and security across your endpoints, and Splashtop AEM brings all that and more.
Want to experience the power, versatility, and convenience of Splashtop AEM for yourself? You can request a demo, or get started today with a free trial:
