Patch management is a process of finding and deploying software updates to fix known vulnerabilities, improve system functionality and performance, and prevent cyberattacks. On the other hand, vulnerability management scans entire IT systems to identify, assess, prioritize, and eliminate known and unknown security weaknesses to protect your system and data from security breaches.
Patch management and vulnerability management are both important in cybersecurity to eliminate risks. They both help improve your organization’s security posture and maintain customer trust.
Although both strategies are similar, they differ in terms of functionality, features, working procedures, zero-day coverage, mitigation strategies, and more. By understanding the differences between patch management and vulnerability management, you can create a comprehensive strategy to minimize security risks, improve business resilience and compliance.
In this article, we will discuss patch management and vulnerability management, their features, differences, best practices, key challenges, and how they work together to provide better security.
What is Patch Management?
Patch management is a process that an organization follows to update software, applications, and devices. The process includes finding, testing, validating, and applying the patch to address bugs and errors. This helps you fix security weaknesses in systems, improve system performance, stability, and functionality, and comply with applicable laws and regulations.
Applying patches on time helps protect your vital business applications, systems, and other assets from cyberthreats, such as zero-day attacks, DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and more. It helps minimize system downtimes, so you can continue serving your customers. To automate the process, you can use patch management software to scan and detect issues and then test, deploy, and install patches.
Features of Patch Management
A proper patch management boosts security, compliance, and operational efficiency of an application. It helps you keep cyber attackers at bay and protect your business and customer data. Below are the important features of patch management:
- Automated patch deployment: Companies often struggle to update their systems. Doing it manually is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Leaving systems unpatched longer increases the chances for attackers to plan and deploy an attack.
Automated patch management quickly scans your systems for missing updates and downloads and installs patches without human intervention. With automation, you can save plenty of time in the process. This keeps you safe from threats while enhancing resource utilization and employee productivity.
- Centralized patch management: You need complete visibility into your devices, servers, and applications. This lets you spot system issues and risks, which systems have vulnerabilities, and whether vendor-released patches are applied correctly. Patch management system offers you a centralized dashboard to simplify the tracking process.
Patch management software provides a single interface to monitor patch status across your devices and applications. You can inspect applied and pending patches and then validate them. This helps security teams take immediate action if an issue arises.
- Patch prioritization: Organizations can have different types of patches to apply for different purposes. Some patches are used to address security flaws and others to improve system performance. A patch management system prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their severity to determine which patches to apply first. This feature helps your security teams focus on urgent updates first.
- Testing and rollback: If you apply patches in your software and devices without proper testing, it can cause unexpected failures and delays. A patch management platform provides a testing environment to review patches before deploying them. It also offers a rollback feature to undo problematic or unsupported patches, which improves your ability to avoid crashes and downtime.
- Multi-platform support: Patch management software supports various operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. It allows you to work with various applications and systems without hassle and while maintaining security.
- Scheduled and on-demand patching: A patch management system allows you to schedule your patches during non-peak hours to reduce business disruptions. It also lets you apply immediate patches that are of higher priority. This way, businesses can balance their security with operational continuity.
- Remote patch management: Organizations that support remote work must ensure employees are using secure systems and devices. Remote patch management applies patches to devices irrespective of their locations. This keeps your remote employees safe and prevents security gaps from turning into a cyberattack.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is a cybersecurity process that helps organizations identify, assess, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities across their IT infrastructure. This secures your data and systems from cyberthreats, such as DDoS attacks, phishing, zero-day attacks, etc. As a result, you can save yourself from reputational damage and financial losses.
Vulnerability management software automates the process of finding and eliminating security weaknesses from your applications, devices, operating systems, and other systems. This lets you secure your systems before attackers could exploit the weaknesses and reduces your organization’s exposure to cyber threats. It is useful for organizations that work under heavy scrutiny, such as healthcare providers, financial institutions, etc., and large enterprises that handle large databases. It helps you enforce security organization-wide and maintain operational integrity and compliance with laws and regulations.
Features of Vulnerability Management
A vulnerability management platform helps businesses identify, prioritize, and mitigate risks before they become serious issues. Below are some of the common features you can find in vulnerability management software to manage vulnerabilities and eliminate risks:
- Automated vulnerability scanning: Vulnerability management software scans your IT infrastructure automatically to detect security vulnerabilities. It uses an extensive database of known vulnerabilities to identify them and resolve them immediately without requiring manual effort or human error.
- Risk-based prioritization: A vulnerability management system assigns a risk score to each vulnerability based on severity, business impact, and exploitability to prioritize weaknesses that need immediate attention. This will help security teams eliminate the most dangerous security gaps first and maintain business continuity.
- Asset discovery: Vulnerability management software scans all your assets, such as endpoints, cloud environments, servers, and IoT devices. The software lists and then scans unmanaged or unknown systems to detect blind spots. This helps you understand your attack surface and issues to be able to take prompt actions to minimize it.
- Patch and remediation: A vulnerability management platform recommends remediation steps for every detected vulnerability. It integrates with patch management systems to deploy security fixes automatically. Some vulnerability management tools also provide alternative mitigation methods to secure your assets temporarily, while you wait for patches to be released.
- Role-based access controls (RBAC): Vulnerability management software assigns role-based access controls (RBAC) to your security professionals, IT admins, and stakeholders. It allows only authorized personnel to access a system or data or make changes to it. This will help you prevent internal threats and unauthorized access.
- Compliance reporting: Vulnerability management software helps you meet the requirements of security and compliance standards. It generates detailed reports with the types of vulnerabilities discovered, measures taken to remediate them, and vulnerabilities that are yet to be resolved as there are no patches available. You will get a report of all security incidents and elimination efforts, which you can present during audits.
Difference Between Patch Management and Vulnerability Management
Patch management and vulnerability management are both cybersecurity processes that help organizations secure their IT infrastructure. However, they have different roles, scopes, and processes. Let’s go through each point to understand the difference between patch management and vulnerability management.
Definition
Patch management is the process of identifying, testing, and applying patches or updates to a system to fix security vulnerabilities and improve its stability and performance. It focuses on keeping software up-to-date by applying patches.
Vulnerability management is the process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating security weaknesses across your IT infrastructure. It goes beyond patching by including risk assessments, mitigation strategies, and reporting.
Key Functions
The core functions of patch management are building an IT inventory, identifying and prioritizing patches, testing for compatibility, creating patching policies, monitoring systems, and deploying patches. After these steps, you need to verify whether the patch is deployed successfully and create patch reports and documentation for audit trails.
The core functions of vulnerability management are monitoring, detecting, analyzing, categorizing, prioritizing, and eliminating security vulnerabilities in a system. It also requires you to rescan the system for remaining vulnerabilities and remediate them.
Objective
Patch management software aims to patch security gaps in software or systems by applying available updates and fixes. It confirms that your systems have the latest security updates to tackle cyber attacks and reduces exposure to threats.
Vulnerability management software, on the other hand, helps businesses identify and eliminate security flaws, even when there is no available patch for that weakness. It provides a complete picture of your organization’s security risks and helps you prioritize and remove vulnerabilities.
Patching and Mitigation
Patch management solution only addresses security flaws if the vendor releases a patch or update. If there is no patch available, you will need to wait for the vendor to release the patch to take further action.
A vulnerability management solution identifies risks and remediates them, whether the patches are available or not. It recommends alternative security measures, such as restricting network access, applying configuration changes, and disabling vulnerable functionalities, to prevent exploitation until a patch is available.
Reporting
Patch management reports focus on various metrics, such as success rates, deployment status, and compliance with security policies. The reports confirm that all the updates are applied successfully.
Vulnerability management reports focus on threat assessments, risk prioritization, and remediation strategies. The reports provide a clear and higher-level view of your organization’s security posture and document all your strategies to remediate or mitigate security flaws.
Automation and Monitoring
Patch management software automates the deployment of patches so that you can save time and focus on other essential tasks, but it doesn’t monitor security risks. It works on a fixed schedule to apply updates on its own to minimize disruptions in business operations. Therefore, it is a reactive approach.
Vulnerability management software runs continuous scans to identify security risks in real-time. Instead of waiting for the next update cycle, it sends alerts whenever it detects new vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is a proactive approach.
Integration
Patch management software works with IT asset management systems. This helps you automate updates across your organization’s IT infrastructure.
Vulnerability management integrates with many tools, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), endpoint security tools, and firewalls, to protect your assets from threats and vulnerabilities. It provides real-time threat intelligence and incident response tools to analyze the attack vectors and the attacker’s purpose to develop a solid strategy for future attacks.
Compliance and Regulatory Impact
Patch management helps organizations meet compliance requirements by keeping your system up-to-date with the latest security updates. But it may not provide full security risk analysis if there are any hidden vulnerabilities that you still need to address.
Vulnerability management helps organizations comply with industry standards, such as HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, and NIST. It generates complete compliance reports for audits and safeguards your company from legal consequences and penalties.
Zero-Day Protection
Zero-day vulnerabilities are security flaws for which there are no patches currently available. This means patch management doesn’t cover zero-day vulnerabilities, only known vulnerabilities. If zero-day vulnerabilities are not patched for longer, the chances are cyber attackers can find and exploit them.
Vulnerability management identifies security weaknesses in systems that may include zero-day vulnerabilities. The process recommends temporary security strategies and mitigation controls, such as firewalls, restricted access, etc., to reduce the attack surface while you wait for the patch.
Patch Management vs Vulnerability Management: 19 Key Differences
Let’s compare patch management vs vulnerability management side by side using the below table. It will help you understand the differences between them:
| Patch Management | Vulnerability Management |
| Patch management is the process of identifying, testing, and applying software updates to fix vulnerabilities, performance issues, and bugs. | Vulnerability management is the process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating security vulnerabilities across an organization’s IT environment. |
| It focuses on updating software and operating systems to close functional or security gaps in them. | It focuses on detecting and eliminating security risks from IT assets to secure them from cyber attacks. |
| It is a reactive approach as it responds only to known vulnerabilities for which a patch is available. | It is a proactive approach as it continuously scans for security risks and provides mitigation strategies if no patch is available. |
| It applies all patches equally and automatically when the vendor releases new patches or updates. | It uses a risk-based prioritization process to categorize threats based on their severity level. |
| It can’t apply patches to zero-day vulnerabilities as these flaws are new and the vendor doesn’t have any patches available to fix them. | It can identify zero-day threats and apply temporary security measures, such as disabling services, restricting access, and enforcing strong password policies and MFA. |
| It automates the patch deployment process on a scheduled and on-demand basis depending on risk severity. | It continuously scans and sends alerts when it finds new threats. |
| It first identifies all the applications and software that need security patches, downloads the patches from the vendor website, tests in a controlled environment, and deploys updates. | It continuously monitors your systems to identify vulnerabilities, assess severity, prioritize threats, and apply patches to eliminate the risks. It again scans your systems to find and remove remaining risks. |
| It helps you meet compliance by keeping software and systems up-to-date. | It helps meet complete regulatory compliance, such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001, by identifying and eliminating security risks and safeguarding sensitive data. |
| It confirms system stability by preventing software crashes due to outdated versions. | It protects sensitive data and IT infrastructure from cyber threats to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. |
| The IT operations team takes the responsibility of deploying and managing patches. | Organizations hire cybersecurity teams to handle the vulnerability management process and other security operations. |
| It is performed on a fixed schedule, such as monthly or quarterly patch cycles. | It continuously scans vulnerabilities in real-time and applies patches immediately to reduce the attack surface. |
| It supports cloud-based patching for employees working remotely. | It supports multi and hybrid cloud environments with continuous monitoring. |
| It leaves the systems and software vulnerable and increases the attack surface when patches are unavailable or delayed. | It suggests compensating controls, such as limiting access controls, isolating risky systems, etc. |
| It provides basic patch reports for future IT audits. | It provides detailed reports on security incidents, threat exposure, and remediation strategies. |
| It causes temporary disruptions in business operations due to system reboots or compatibility issues. | It poses minimal impact on business operations as it focuses on continuously detecting and applying security measures without disrupting operations. |
| It is not integrated with threat intelligence tools for further analysis. | It is integrated with threat intelligence platforms to study attack vectors and the purpose of attacks to develop a full-proof plan to eliminate future threats. |
| It doesn’t address human-based security risks, such as phishing attacks and weak passwords. | It identifies human-based security flaws, such as weak credentials, poor security practices, and misconfigurations, and addresses them to protect your systems. |
| Example: A company applies the latest Windows Server patch to fix a remote code execution vulnerability. | Example: Security professionals detect an exposed database due to weak password and authentication. They restrict access permissions and enforce multi-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access. |
How Patch and Vulnerability Management Work Together for Better Security
Patch management and vulnerability management in cybersecurity are complementary processes that help your organization detect, assess, and remediate security risks. Here is how they work together to give you a healthy and safe IT environment:
- Vulnerability management scans the entire IT environment to detect security weaknesses, including unpatched software, open network ports, weak authentication settings, and misconfigured cloud settings.
- Vulnerability management assesses every risk based on attack complexity, business risk, and availability of active exploits in security communities. This way, it prioritizes vulnerabilities into low, medium, high, and critical.
- Patch management deploys fixes for known vulnerabilities in software, systems, and applications. A vulnerability management platform provides remediation and mitigation strategies for other known and unknown weaknesses.
- Patch management allows IT teams to test the compatibility of patches with your existing software and systems. This prevents system downtime and failures. After successfully deploying patches, vulnerability management re-scans the entire system to check for remaining issues and fixes them to confirm that all vulnerabilities are eliminated.
- Vulnerability management continuously monitors your organization’s IT infrastructure for new security flaws. Patch management maintains logs of all applied updates for audits so that vulnerability management can generate a complete report on security incidents to meet HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and other compliance requirements.
Vulnerability management focuses on identifying and removing security vulnerabilities across IT assets, while patch management focuses on deploying patches or updates to fix known vulnerabilities. Together, they create a security strategy that helps organizations identify and patch security weaknesses before cyber attackers find and exploit them.
How can SentinelOne help?
SentinelOne’s Singularity Vulnerability Management helps you detect unknown IT assets and vulnerabilities and eliminate them to protect your systems and data. The platform allows you to prioritize vulnerabilities based on how risky they are for your business and apply patches on them to close security gaps.
SentinelOne offers continuous vulnerability assessments to help you find security risks and evaluate your security and compliance posture. It simplifies security and IT workflows and automates controls to save you time and resources. You get advanced vulnerability scanners that consume less bandwidth and offer a complete, real-time view into your Windows, macOS, Linux, and other systems without compromising system performance.
Take a tour to explore Singularity Vulnerability Management.
Conclusion
Patch management and vulnerability management are two important aspects of cybersecurity that protect an organization’s IT infrastructure. Both have strategies to address security risks to improve security and compliance posture for your organization. Although they are similar, they are still different in various aspects, such as objectives, process, coverage, and more.
Patch management focuses on deploying software updates to fix bugs and known vulnerabilities. Whereas vulnerability management takes a broader approach to identify and eliminate security risks. Patch management without vulnerability management can leave security gaps, particularly if a patch is unavailable, (a zero-day vulnerability for instance). Therefore, it is recommended to use both of them in your cybersecurity strategy to be able to achieve a more secure IT infrastructure.
If you’re looking for a good vulnerability and patch management solution, SentinelOne’s Singularity Vulnerability Management is an excellent solution. Book a call for details.
FAQs
What is the difference between patch management and vulnerability management?
Patch management is the process of identifying, listing, testing, and applying software updates to fix security vulnerabilities and improve system stability and performance. It involves fixing known vulnerabilities and waiting for vendors/product developers to release updates to apply them to the software or system.
Vulnerability management is a continuous process that helps organizations identify, assess, prioritize, and remediate security weaknesses across their IT infrastructure. It addresses vulnerabilities like misconfigurations, weak passwords, open ports, and unpatched software. Also, it detects and eliminates all known and unknown risks to secure your environment.
Why is patch management important in cybersecurity?
Patch management is essential in cybersecurity because it fixes bugs and security flaws to prevent your systems and data from cyber attacks. It helps organizations protect against malware and ransomware, reduce the attack surface, improve system stability, and minimize downtime.
How do vulnerability and patch management complement each other?
Vulnerability and patch management work together to create a strong cybersecurity defense across your IT infrastructure. While vulnerability management helps in identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and fixing security vulnerabilities, patch management tests systems and applies patches to known vulnerabilities. Using both of them in your security strategy helps you fight against a variety of risks (including zero-day vulnerabilities) and protect your assets and confidential data.
What are the best practices for vulnerability patch management?
To effectively manage security risks, you can consider following these vulnerability patch management best practices:
- Scan IT systems continuously to identify missing patches and security flaws.
- Use CVSS scores and risk-based prioritization methods to focus on fixing more dangerous vulnerabilities and risks first.
- Test patches before applying to check whether they are compatible and avoid business disruptions.
- Apply routine updates while addressing vulnerabilities.
- Ensure your organization has a data backup and restoration plan in case a patch causes issues.
- Apply temporary mitigations like firewall rules, security policies, etc., to secure your systems if there are no patches available for a security risk.
What are the different types of patch management strategies?
Organizations can use different patch management strategies to find and fix security risks, safeguard their systems, stay compliant, and avoid operational disruptions. Different types of patch management strategies are:
- Regular patch schedules
- Critical and security-first patching
- Automated patch management
- Patch testing before deployment
- Cloud-based patch management
- Emergency or on-demand patching
- Compliance-based patching