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P-Guide Patch Management

P-Guide, Patch Management: An In-depth Look
Patch management is a challenging but crucial task in today's environment.  What options do you have at your disposal?
Date Published: November 17, 2008
Format: PDF
Length: 4 pages
Excerpt:
Patch Management is a critical task that can quickly drain away your time and resources.  What options do you have at your disposal?  By any measure, patch management is a crucial task. How crucial? Consider:

  • According to the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, there were 417 known security holes in 1999. That figure jumped to 1,090 in 2000 and has risen steadily each year since. During the first three quarters of 2008 alone, the organization catalogued 6,058 different vulnerabilities.
  • A mid-2008 report from IBM's X-Force Threat Analysis Service offers similar numbers, and notes that the number of "high-severity" vulnerabilities (which it defines as "security issues that allow immediate remote or local access, or immediate execution of code or commands with unauthorized privileges") continues to rise.
  • The threats continue to evolve, and even desktop applications such as Adobe Reader are being targeted of late and the rise of cloud computing is offering new avenues of opportunity for cyber criminals.


In short, it pays to keep current with patches and updates. The trouble is that patch management can be a time- and resource-draining chore, particularly given the sheer volume of patches that are issued each year.

What Can You Do?
Given that manual patching is too costly and labor-intensive for all but the smallest companies, it pays to invest in a patch management system. There are numerous products at your disposal.

  • One option is Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), which is available for free download. The software has some advantages: It does a fair job of streamlining the patch-management process, allowing users to manually or automatically download and distributes patches and updates. However, its reporting capabilities are limited, it only supports relatively current Microsoft-issued updates and patches, and needs its own dedicated server and a Microsoft 
    Server license.


Fill out the form below to download the entire P-Guide and learn ten questions you should ask of your environment before you select a patch management solution. 

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