What is Patch Management?

Patch management is the continuous process of identifying, downloading, testing, and deploying patches to OSes and third-party apps for remediating security vulnerabilities, fixing software bugs, and introducing new features. Simply put, patches secure your endpoints, ensure system stability, and help you maintain compliance with strict regulatory frameworks.

If in the past manual patching was your only option, today the process can be fully automated by using patch management platforms. They enable faster vulnerability remediation with minimal manual effort. Without a doubt, patch managers provide everything needed to protect your systems from cyberattacks launched through flaw exploitation.

But achieving the best results and squeezing the full potential of the software depends on you or your team. Simply deploying a patch management platform isn’t enough. There are many other critical steps to take before you’re ready to pull the trigger and launch your first automated deployment.

This article aims to take you beyond just understanding patch management fundamentals, so we’re going to talk in detail about:

• Why is patch management important?
• What benefits does it deliver?
• What are the three main types of patches?
• What challenges will you face?
• How do you implement a patch management strategy?
• What is the patch management lifecycle?
• What are the 6 steps in the process?
• What are the best practices?
• How do you choose the right software?

Why Is Patch Management Important?

Patch management is important because it keeps your endpoints running with the latest software versions, which guarantees they are secure, smoothly performing, and compliant. When there are no unpatched security flaws, cybercriminals can’t breach your systems through known vulnerability exploitation. You are less likely to experience operating system or third-party application glitches and bugs. And last but not least, you will always have access to the newest software features.

In many cases, delaying patch deployments is as risky as not deploying them at all. Yes, the latter is worse, but keeping a security patch on hold for an undefined period of time can teach you a lesson for life (usually in the form of a costly ransomware attack). Did you know that the mind-blowing number of 34% of the ransomware attacks in 2025 originated from unpatched software flaws? Such bad cyber hygiene can also be a reason for data breaches, since 20% of all worldwide cases happened due to neglecting timely patch deployment.

Besides cyberattacks, you’re setting yourself up for a nasty surprise when regulatory bodies come knocking. Financial penalties are just the beginning. The reputational damage can be impossible to undo, because who’s going to trust you with their sensitive data if you frequently fail during audits?

Patching delays are usually dictated by the fear of downtime or the intention to avoid operational disruption, meanwhile days go by while unpatched systems remain vulnerable. And that’s the real problem that keeps the aforementioned numbers increasing year over year.

Thankfully, nowadays there are patch management platforms like Action1 that automate the process end-to-end and provide you with features that enable scheduled, autonomous, risk-free deployments. Usually, with just a few clicks, you can turn patching into a set-it-and-forget-it task that successfully strengthens your overall security posture, minimizes manual work, and maximizes your team’s productivity, all without expanding your IT team or investing thousands of dollars in new hardware.

What Are the Benefits of Patch Management?

Patch management makes your devices and infrastructure secure, operationally stable, and compliant through automated and remote management. But that’s a generic explanation, so let’s break down the benefits one by one:

• Stronger security posture: Timely patch deployments close security gaps before cybercriminals have the chance to find and exploit them.
• Minimized downtime: You can schedule patches during off-hours and weekends, while automated testing prevents unexpected system failures.
• Smooth endpoint operation: Keeping the operating system and all third-party applications up-to-date results in fewer software bugs and faster endpoint operation.
• Simplified regulatory compliance: Audit-ready reports can be generated with just a few clicks by using a fully customizable template, reducing report generation from hours to minutes.
• Cost efficiency/ Adequate hardware and manpower allocation: Cloud-native patch management tools need no extra hardware, VPNs, or complex setup to function. Besides, a single administrator can easily manage thousands of on-premises and remote endpoints.
• Minimized attack surface and manual work: Automated deployments mean faster vulnerability remediation with minimal effort.
• Boosted employee productivity: Scheduled deployments and fewer software bugs allow your employees to work in comfort without operational disruptions.

What Are the Three Main Types of Patches?

There are three main types of patches that are responsible for keeping your systems secure, stable, and compliant:

Security Patches

These are the critical patches that are released by OS and third-party software vendors to fix security flaws. In the last couple of years, we’ve witnessed a huge increase in disclosed vulnerabilities. Some are critical, others not so, but they all pose the risk of falling victim to cybercriminals.

In general, security patches are the ones that must be deployed as soon as possible, because they fix the code imperfections that hackers exploit to get into your organization’s systems, then escalate privileges, deploy ransomware, malware, spyware or exfiltrate sensitive data.

Bug Fixes

As we’ve already mentioned in the article, these patches have one particular purpose and it is fixing software bugs. When your apps or operating system start crashing, freezing, or becoming unresponsive, these patches fix the issues. Theoretically, they are considered as secondary ones, compared to security patches, but they deliver performance improvements that can have a massive impact on your employees’ productivity.

Feature Updates

Feature updates are released by vendors to improve your user experience and introduce the latest program features. Bear in mind that these updates can range from minor to significant. Examples include simple design tweaks, AI-powered automations, brand-new tools, or enhancements to existing features.

What Are the Most Common Challenges of Patch Management?

In practice, organizations of different sizes report that the most common challenges are related to establishing regular maintenance windows, buggy patches, limited endpoint visibility (especially for offline devices), compatibility issues, and resource constraints.

To make things clearer, let’s have a closer look at why these are the biggest pain points for so many companies worldwide:

• Inability to find a suitable window for patching: This is a significant problem, especially for enterprises and manufacturers that aim to achieve 24/7 uptime. It’s no secret that after software updates, systems must be rebooted, or at least most of the time, which of course means downtime. Balancing security with operational demands proves tricky, but with careful planning and patch management platforms, this gets way easier.
• Limited visibility: Applies mostly to large enterprises where thousands of endpoints must be managed. Visibility gaps occur due to incomplete inventory, forgotten devices, human mistakes, overlooking, or complex hybrid environments. In such instances, the best way to solve the problem is to use cloud-native, agent-based patching platforms like Action1. Once the agent is installed, the endpoint remains visible 24/7/365.
• Offline endpoints: During scheduled deployments, offline endpoints can’t be patched, and as you might imagine, this creates security gaps. Fortunately, many patch managers have the capability to queue the missed updates for these endpoints and install them upon coming back online.
• Buggy patches: A problematic patch can cause unplanned downtime by creating new problems while supposedly fixing old ones, and that’s a huge pain. Ironically, you end up worse off than before. However, these risks can be minimized by using patch management platforms that offer one-click rollback capability and features like update rings for staged and autonomous rollouts.
• Legacy systems: It’s well known that every organization has at least one legacy system that might be used for printing documents or other minor activity. The problem is that they frequently run on outdated software, making them the “trojan horse” in your cybersecurity strategy.
• Sheer patch volumes: IT teams often find themselves overwhelmed by the constant flow of updates, making it a mission impossible to keep up without missing patches. This is compounded by the complexity of modern organizational IT environments, which often include a mix of on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid systems, each requiring different approaches to the patch management process.
• Resource constraints: Many organizations either lack “know-how” staff or the budget to purchase a reliable patch management platform. Whatever the reason, this leads to blind spots, incomplete patching, errors, and oversights.

How to Implement a Patch Management Strategy?

First, you have to define your approach. Second, select and deploy a patch management platform. Third, establish governance, policies, and standard operating procedures. Fourth, configure the automation according to your company’s needs and specifications. Fifth, train your team on the process so they know what to do.

This one-time setup determines whether the patching process will deliver the expected results or not. Implementing an effective patch management strategy is not rocket science and works when planned and executed correctly. To make things clearer, let’s see what actions each stage demands:

Define Your Patch Management Framework and Approach

The first step is to pick convenient time slots for creating regular maintenance windows. Will it be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly? Is that going to happen during the workday, evenings, or weekends? Next, you have to define clear severity classifications and act accordingly.

For instance, deploy critical patches within 24-36 hours, high-severity within a week maybe, and non-critical during scheduled maintenance windows. Decide how many endpoints will be included in your test ring, then in the broad ring, and finally in the production ring. Once you have all these answers in your head, document them on paper and create your framework that guides all future patching processes.

Choose and Deploy Your Patch Management Platform

Choose automated tools that offer cross-platform OS support, a broad third-party catalog (it must cover all your programs), a rich feature set, and cloud-native architecture. Agent-based platforms deploy in minutes, eliminate VPNs and hardware dependencies, and literally monitor your endpoints 24/7, showing their patch, compliance, and device status.

Double-check that the solution offers you update rings (for staged rollouts) or other similar feature, flexible scheduling, fully customizable report templates, and security features like MFA, RBAC, etc. Last but not least, check its security certificates, whether it is compliant with SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, TX-RAMP, and if it follows the industry best practices related to data security such as PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST.

Once you’ve made your choice, you have to install the agent on each and every device. From there on, they can be managed easily directly from the web browser with no complex configurations.

Establish Governance, Policies, and Standard Operating Procedures

Create formal patch management policies that navigate the process and clarify the responsibilities of each person involved. For small companies with stretched-thin teams, one or two people can manage the whole process. Yet, large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of endpoints might need more people in order to manage the process effectively. Keep in mind that each company must create its own policy, because what may resonate well for one organization may fall short for another.

Your next step should be vulnerability management qualification. By that, we mean clarifying which flaws are critical (CVSS 9.0+ score) and which are non-critical (CVSS <=5.0 score). Apart from the already mentioned maintenance windows, you have to establish escalation procedures for patch failures, clearly outlining who gets notified and what authority they have during the process.

Configure Automation Rules

The key to successful automation is configuring rules that deploy the right patches at the right time. Set up rules to automatically deploy identified missing patches that match your critical security criteria while holding non-critical feature updates for scheduled maintenance windows. This approach balances urgent security needs against operational stability.

Implement update rings for staged rollouts by creating a ring structure tailored to your organization’s size and complexity. Larger enterprises might configure 4-5 rings (test, pilot, production wave 1, production wave 2, final rollout), while SMBs typically need only 2-3 (test, pilot, production). Define success criteria for each ring so patches advance automatically when they meet your thresholds, typically 95%+ installation success with zero critical errors.

Enable deployment notifications to keep your team informed about both successful deployments and failures without requiring constant dashboard monitoring. Configure retry logic to automatically attempt failed patches 2-3 times using different strategies (different times, different sequences) before escalating to manual review. Finally, customize the built-in report templates to generate audit-ready compliance documentation in minutes, ensuring you’re always prepared for regulatory reviews.

Train Your Team and Launch the Program

Each person from your team must know how to work with the patch management program and strictly follow the established path of the process. It’s a good idea to schedule short meetings to discuss ideas, concerns, and errors on a regular basis. Keep in mind that regularly training your IT teams on the latest patching techniques and staying informed about emerging threats and security vulnerabilities is essential.

What Is the Patch Management Lifecycle?

The patch management lifecycle contains 7 stages from start to finish: asset identification, vulnerability and patch assessment, testing, deployment, verification, reporting, and maintenance. Each stage is tightly connected to the next, working together to remediate known software vulnerabilities, fix bugs, and deliver the latest features across your OSes and third-party applications.

• Asset Identification: Organizations identify all assets in their network that require patching, like workstations, servers, mobile devices, tablets, virtual machines, etc.
• Vulnerability and Patch Assessment: IT teams evaluate available software patches and prioritize them based on the severity of vulnerabilities and potential impact on business operations.
• Testing: Patches are applied in a controlled environment to ensure they don’t cause conflicts, bugs, or disrupt existing systems.
• Deployment: Patches are rolled out across the organization, often in waves to minimize unexpected downtime risk.
• Verification: This stage ensures patches were successfully installed and are functioning as expected.
• Reporting: In this stage, detailed patch documentation must be created to clearly show which patches were deployed, when, to how many devices, and at what success rate.
• Maintenance: This is an ongoing process of monitoring for new patches, assessing current patch status, and restarting the cycle when necessary.

Be aware that the patch management lifecycle is not a one-time process. It is a continuous one. Why is that? Because vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis and then patches are released in order to fix them. For that reason, every organization is obligated to repeat these steps for maintaining a secure and efficient IT environment that has the right approach and capabilities to address all new vulnerabilities.

6 Step Patch Management Process

From start to finish, the patch management process contains six steps. Below we will discuss in detail this never-ending cycle your IT team should follow to keep each of your endpoints patched:

NOTE: This guide assumes you’re using patch management software like Action1.

Step 1: Asset Inventory and Discovery

Creating and maintaining an up-to-date inventory of your hardware and software assets is of immense importance. This eliminates the possibility of leaving blind spots or weak links across your environment. Naturally, large enterprises and even SMBs constantly add new devices, and this happens between patch lifecycles.

The easiest way to avoid unpleasant surprises is by using a patch management platform that is cloud-native and requires agents to be installed on each endpoint to function. In this way, once you deploy the agent, it will remain visible 24/7, feeding the cloud platform with current information about the patch, compliance, and device info like offline/online status, OS, installed software, etc.

So it’s absolutely mandatory to equip each of your devices, workstations, virtual machines, and servers with the agent for proper asset management.

Step 2: Vulnerability Assessment and Patch Identification

You must run a vulnerability scan using your vulnerability management (scanning) tool to identify existing flaws across your endpoints. If using patch managers like Action1, they automatically detect both current vulnerabilities and missing patches that address them. On the dashboard, you will see detailed information about how many flaws are detected, on how many of your endpoints, their CVSS score, and level of criticality (low, medium, high).

Step 3: Patch Prioritization and Risk Analysis

Prioritize patches based on their risk, considering CVSS scores, known exploits, asset exposure, and potential business impact. Then proceed with deploying security fixes to high-priority vulnerabilities as soon as possible, especially for those indicating active exploits.

Lower-risk patches can be installed during the next routine maintenance window. The secret sauce of an effective patch management policy is to align patching priorities with direct business impact, because in this way you can balance security with operational continuity needs.

Step 4: Patch Testing and Validation

Patch testing prevents unexpected downtime and saves you lots of headaches. Never jump straight into organization-wide rollouts. First, you have to validate that each patch works as expected and fixes problems instead of introducing new ones. To do so, you can create staging or sandbox environments that mirror your production environment and deploy patches there first. If systems remain stable and everything goes smoothly, you can confidently continue to the next rollout stage.

Step 5: Patch Deployment Process

Deploy approved patches to production endpoints during your scheduled maintenance windows. Use Update Rings for staged rollouts that minimize risk through autonomous promotion. Configure your first ring with a small percentage of production endpoints (5-10%). If success rates stay above your threshold (typically 95%) and no critical issues appear within 24-48 hours, patches automatically promote to the next ring.

Continue this progression through subsequent rings until full production coverage is achieved. For critical security patches that can’t wait for scheduled windows, you can deploy them immediately but still use staged rollouts.

Remember to configure reboots after each installation so the patches take full effect. The best patch management platforms like Action1 allow you to schedule these reboots at your convenience, and also queue patches for offline devices and install them when they reconnect.

Step 6: Verification, Continuous Monitoring, and Documentation

The final step focuses on confirming successful patch installations and maintaining ongoing system security. You or your team must first closely review if all the patches are successfully deployed across each endpoint. Then these systems must be monitored for the next one or two days to confirm that everything works as expected. Last but not least, you have to generate reports for audit and tracking purposes.

What Are the Best Practices for Patch Management?

What follows are ten practical and proven best practices that help you establish a consistent patch management process while minimizing mistakes and gaps.

• Use patch management software: It automates each step of the process from vulnerability identification to remediation and report generation. You can keep all your on-premises and remote endpoints up-to-date, secure, and compliant with just a few clicks. Maximum protection with minimal effort and downtime risks.
• Always prioritize critical security patches: Critical vulnerabilities get exploited quickly and easily, leading to major security incidents with devastating consequences. Deploy the necessary patches within 24-36 hours after identifying them on your systems. If you want to protect your organization, act quickly and don’t wait for the next scheduled maintenance window, because hackers won’t wait either.
• Have separate procedures for standard and emergency patching: Use regular maintenance windows for consistent testing and deployment of patches. Yet, the hard truth is that you need an emergency patching procedure for immediate deployment to cut the time gap between vulnerability identification and remediation.
• Create backups or snapshots before patch rollouts: This is your “plan B” in case anything goes wrong. Backups and snapshots prevent data loss and minimize downtime.
• Timely patching both your OS and third-party apps is mandatory: Successful patch management starts and ends with timely patching of both your OS and third-party apps. Recent research show that the majority of exploited vulnerabilities come from unpatched programs like Adobe, Java, Chrome, and Mozilla. Not all patches remediate critical flaws, but each of them is important and must be deployed as soon as possible.
• Test patches before production system rollouts: Start deploying patches to a small group of non-critical systems to see if everything works as expected. Testing slows down deployment, but it saves you from multiple late nights in the office trying to fix things that a problematic patch has caused.
• Use staged rollouts: Update Rings is a feature that allows you to roll out patches in stages. You can create multiple rings (groups of endpoints) to roll out patches in stages, with autonomous promotion based on success criteria. Reliable patches progress to the next rings, while problematic ones don’t. This way, you may need to fix 50 endpoints instead of 10,000.
• Schedule deployments at convenient times: If you can’t afford downtime during the workday, schedule the patching process outside business hours or during weekends. Centralized patch management systems like Action1 provide the needed flexibility to keep your systems secured with minimal operational disruptions.
• Handle offline devices automatically: Equip your security team with patch management software that offers the capability to patch devices once they come back online. Look for agent-based platforms, since they monitor each device 24/7/365 and show detailed info about it.
• Create detailed audit-ready reports: After each patching cycle, it’s immensely important to document everything. You will need these reports to prove compliance once regulatory bodies knock on your door. Modern patch management platforms offer fully customizable templates that allow you to generate these reports in minutes. They save hundreds of thousands in regulatory fines, so never skip report generation.

Finding the Best Patch Management Solution Suitable for You

Nowadays, finding a reliable patch management solution is a bit tricky, because there are countless vendors offering their services as the best on the market. The thing is that choosing a patch management platform isn’t as simple as picking the highest-rated option. With the right approach, your organization can find the perfect blend of functionality at a reasonable price. That’s why we will now discuss what to look for in order to pick the one that meets your organization’s needs and requirements.

• Cross-platform OS support: Look for a solution that supports Windows, macOS, and Linux systems.
• Third-party coverage: Ensure the platform offers coverage for all of the third-party applications used across your network. A huge advantage is if the vendor maintains a private and secure software repository. This ensures each patch is thoroughly tested for malware and supply chain attacks before reaching your endpoints.
• Automation & Scheduling: Check if the software automates each step of the process, from vulnerability identification to remediation, reboot, and report generation. Also, ensure it comes with flexible scheduling allowing you to deploy patches at your convenience.
• Vulnerability management: You need software that offers real-time identification of vulnerabilities plus a risk-based prioritization based on CVE numbers, CVSS scores, threat intelligence feeds, and indication of active exploitation (CISA KEV) as well as usage in known ransomware campaigns. It must also offer you built-in remediation capabilities for identified vulnerabilities through automated patch deployments, removal of unsupported or legacy software, or centralized documentation of compensating controls for flaws that cannot be patched.
• Cloud-native architecture: Allows seamless scalability, easy implementation, no additional expenses for VPNs, or hardware infrastructure. With such a platform you can patch both on-premises and remote endpoints directly in your browser.
• Advanced reporting: You must be able to easily generate audit-ready reports after each patch lifecycle and have real-time visibility into your endpoints.
• Compliance and Security Regulations: Choose a vendor that is certified for SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, TX-RAMP, and follows the industry best practices related to data security such as PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and NIST.
• Intuitive interface: The software must not only deliver end-to-end automation, but also be easy to use. It is counter-productive to invest in a solution you or your team members can’t understand and manage.
• Cost: Understand whether you will be charged per endpoint, per admin, or by subscription tiers this is essential to ensure the solution fits your budget.

About Action1

Action1 is an autonomous endpoint management platform trusted by many Fortune 500 companies. Cloud-native, infinitely scalable, highly secure, and configurable in 5 minutes—it just works and is always free for the first 200 endpoints, with no functional limits. By pioneering autonomous OS and third-party patching with peer-to-peer patch distribution and real-time vulnerability assessment without needing a VPN, it eliminates routine labor, preempts ransomware and security risks, and protects the digital employee experience.

In 2025, Action1 was recognized by Inc. 5000 as the fastest-growing private software company in America. The company is founder-led by Alex Vovk and Mike Walters, American entrepreneurs who previously founded Netwrix, a multi-billion-dollar cybersecurity company.