Vulnerability management is the continual process of assessing, identifying, managing, remediating, and reporting security vulnerabilities across endpoints, systems, and workloads. 

In today's world, data breaches and cyberattacks are very common. There are many news reports of the latest cyber incident nearly every week. You can understand why cybersecurity is an increasing concern for businesses with lots of data breaches happening all around the world.

Nowadays, unpatched software represents a massive cybersecurity challenge for IT enterprises. Therefore, the vulnerability in this environment is common and patches are available to prevent any cyber threats. 

What is Patch Management?

Patch management is a process that helps develop, test and install more than one patch on current applications and software tools on a computer, making sure the systems stay updated on current patches and deciding which of the patches is the appropriate one. 

Malware exists to exploit vulnerabilities that are discovered in software. Patches exist to fix those vulnerabilities. Therefore, why do many vulnerabilities remain unpatched? Why is patch management so complicated? Is software patching an art or science? 

The term patch triggers many familiar scenarios which include the duct tape repairs of different objects, affixing a rubber patch to a blown bicycle tire and much more. While these temporary fixes won’t heal the fundamental cause, they are easy and quick solutions.

Patch management and software patching is an essential component in IT. However, we overestimate its capacity to solve security issues. Most times, there is an assumption that if your IT security team is not keeping up with patching, it’s always going to be their fault when there is a vulnerability in your network. Therefore, let’s explore this process and discuss this model of security patching, challenges of software patching and how these challenges can be tackled. 

The primary security measure to prevent cyber attacks is software patching. Many organizations know the benefits of patching, but the challenge begins when carrying out patching as a routine activity.