The use of third-party code has become essential to software development. Available as open-source or off-the-shelf, this third-party code shortens production time and costs, while enabling developers to focus on client specific features. These pre-packaged bundles of code might seem like a boon, but they can lead to headaches, negative financial impact, and loss of client trust.

Vulnerability remediation is the process of discovering IT vulnerabilities and assessing their risks to develop viable countermeasures and remedies. This assessment is a proactive strategy to addressing the vulnerabilities and, if feasible, eliminating the risk.

Over 5,000 vulnerabilities make their way to headlines every year. The number will continue to grow, considering that the publicly disclosed vulnerabilities encourage the hackers in their devious acts.

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.

If you are a cybersecurity veteran, you would know that one of the best ways to prevent a data breach is through vulnerability scanning.

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. 

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.