To keep up with increasingly cunning hackers and safeguard your network, you need to detect risks and patch them. So, to protect your network, you need vulnerability and patch management to do the dirty work. Vulnerability management tool detects security risks, and patch management tool remediates the detected risks. This way, you ensure a robust defense against potential threats. But in the patch management vs vulnerability management battle, are they the same? Similar? Or completely different?
Let’s find out.
Understanding the Difference: Patch Management vs. Vulnerability Management
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is the proactive approach to identifying, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities in your enterprise before a hacker exploits the risks. In simple terms, it is the process of trying to stop an attack before it happens by fixing the potential risks.
Typically, you continuously scan and assess security weaknesses that can be exploited by attackers and fix them before it’s too late.
Vulnerability Management Lifecycle
Understanding the vulnerability management lifecycle will give you clarity on the differences between vulnerability and patch management. The vulnerability management lifecycle has 4 main steps. Let’s go through each of them.
- Discovery: You can’t protect what you can’t see is the mantra we must follow. So, discovery is the process of identifying assets in your enterprise and the security risks that could be infecting them.
- Assessment: Better understanding makes for better decisions. So, assessment is the process of evaluating the security risks, their severity, and the potential impact they can have if exploited by hackers.
- Prioritization: Your organization can have millions of risks, and you must focus on the ones that matter. The process involves understanding the criticality of risks and remediating the ones that pose critical threats.
- Remediation: It’s not management if the risk is not fixed! So, remediation involves fixing the risks you’ve detected and assessed. Arguably, it’s the most important part of the vulnerability management lifecycle.
What is Patch Management?
Patch management is the process of managing patches/updates for different software applications in your enterprise. In simple terms, it can be considered as the remediation part of vulnerability management (although it is not fully accurate).
The process usually involves identifying, downloading, testing, and installing patches to fix bugs, mitigate security risks, and also enhance functionality.
Patch Management Lifecycle:
To better understand the difference between patch and vulnerability management, let’s take a look at the patch management lifecycle. It is a 5-step process that’ll reduce your attack surface and add new features and bug fixes.
- Identification: To patch properly, you must know the available patches. So, identification is the process of detecting missing but available patches for apps in your enterprise network.
- Assessment: To patch or not to patch, that is the question! Not all patches are needed, and sometimes, patches can break your existing setup, too. So, assessment involves finding out if you truly need the patch and how critical it is.
- Testing: Untested patches can have consequences! Testing is the process of verifying patches in a controlled environment to ensure they don’t disrupt your existing process.
- Deployment: Deploy the patch and cross your fingers! Deployment is the process of applying patches to live systems that make up your enterprise network.
- Verification: Check, check, and triple-check! Verification is the process of ensuring patches are successfully installed, and systems are functioning correctly.
Patch Management vs. Vulnerability management: A Tabular Difference
| Patch Management | Vulnerability Management | |
| What is it? | To update systems and applications, fixing bugs and closing security gaps. | To identify, evaluate, and mitigate security vulnerabilities. |
| What’s its scope? | Focuses on deploying patches. | Focuses on discovering and addressing vulnerabilities. |
| What is the Result? | Systems are updated and secured against known issues | Reduced risk of exploitation through proactive management |
| How often do you do it? | Typically short-term, driven by patch release schedules | Ongoing and continuous. |
Understanding the Similarities
Despite their differences, patch management, and vulnerability management have some overlaps too. Additionally, both are critical processes that you must implement and follow to improve your organization’s overall security posture.
Here are some key similarities you must know!
- End Goal: While they differ in implementation, both patch management and vulnerability management are processes with the end goal of protecting your enterprise from security threats.
- Proactive Approach: A good similarity is that both involve proactively taking action! Patch management applies patches, and vulnerability management mitigates risks instead of waiting for attacks to happen.
- Risk Reduction: Another key similarity is that both processes significantly reduce the risk of exploitation and, as a result, reduce the attack surface.
- Continuous Monitoring: Lastly, both processes require ongoing monitoring and assessment to ensure continued protection.
Understanding the Maturity Model
Understanding the vulnerability and patch management maturity models can also help you understand the difference between them and make better decisions. Let’s take a brief look at the models.
Vulnerability Management Maturity Model
The vulnerability management maturity model has 5 key levels in place. Let’s understand each of them.
1. Initial (Ad hoc): The first level of managing risks. It typically has limited and ineffective vulnerability management without proper processes set in place.
2. Managed (Repeatable): A minor upgrade to the vulnerability management process. It involves setting up processes and following them consistently.
3. Defined (Standardized): The next step of the model, with significant updates to the process. It includes documenting and standardizing processes and using automated tools for vulnerability detection.
4. Quantitatively Managed: The penultimate step that involves rigorously following metrics and measuring effectiveness. You also learn and optimize the set process by analyzing data and results
5. Optimizing: The final step of the model typically involves continuously improving the existing process with advanced threat intelligence integration and predictive vulnerability management.
Patch Management Maturity Model
Similar to the vulnerability management maturity model, the patch management model also has 5 levels in place.
1. Initial (Ad hoc): This is the first level of patch management, which is usually ad hoc and without any set guidelines. The patching process is a reactive response to requirements or attacks.
2. Managed (Repeatable): This is the next level of the model with basic patch management processes set in place. The idea is to establish and consistently follow the set processes.
3. Defined (Standardized): The standardized patch management model with proper documentation of policies and procedures.
4. Quantitatively Managed: The penultimate step of the maturity model involves measuring the patching effectiveness with metrics and reviewing and improving it.
5. Optimizing: The final step of the model that is used to continuously improve the process with automated patch deployment and native integration with other security processes like vulnerability management.
Conclusion
Patch management is essential for keeping systems updated and fixing known vulnerabilities, and vulnerability management provides a broader, proactive approach to identifying and mitigating security risks.
But is it enough to prevent cyberattacks?
Modern cyberattackers are increasingly getting smarter, and so should we.
Learn how you can upgrade your vulnerability and patch management with SanerNow.
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