How To Create & Implement A Patch Management Policy

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Author: Jason Firch / Last Updated: 11/06/22

Reviewed By: Michael Swanagan, CISSP, CISA & Josh Allen

View Our: Editorial Process

You can implement and enforce patch management policies by monitoring processes, configuring group policies, and using a patching tool such as SCCM, Satellite, or Wsus. When writing a patch management policy you should consider starting with a template, classifying your data, system restore procedures, and production environments.

Vulnerability management is a big and complex component of an enterprise cyber security program and has a tendency to overwhelm inexperienced IT departments.

Ultimately, a vulnerability management program requires ingesting and parsing complex sets of data.

The threat landscape includes an ever-increasing number of CVEs that may impact a vast array of applications, services, and configurations.

CVSS vulnerability severity scores and vectors and threat intelligence data are also required to provide additional context to each vulnerability’s potential threat.

Vulnerability management’s burden of complexity often leads to the implementation of costly and inefficient vulnerability management programs.

Comparing patch vs vulnerability management, patch management is an important subcomponent of a greater patch management program.

In this article, we will explain what a patch management policy is, why you need to have one to ensure a secure organization, and tips for writing and enforcing policies.

What Is A Patch Management Policy?

A patch management policy is a document that outlines an organization’s formal strategy and processes to ensure hardware and software updates are applied in a timely manner across an entire IT environment.

Patch management is responsible for the timely installation of software updates including security patches.

Why Do You Need A Patch Management Policy?

Patch management remediates vulnerabilities that would otherwise offer attackers an opportunity to compromise systems and data within an IT environment

Patch management is critical for enabling risk-based vulnerability management and is a key requirement for formal IT security compliance standards such as ISO-270001, PCI-DSS, and SOC-2.

A patch management policy also ensures that updates are performed reliably according to clearly outlined standard procedures and establishes clear roles & responsibilities for all parties involved.

What Should Be Included In A Patch Management Policy?

When writing a patch management policy you should include:

• Purpose
• Audience
• Responsibility
• Policy Controls

Purpose

Declaring the overall purpose of the patch management policy clearly sets the mission statement for all members of the organization.

The purpose section also introduces the concept of patch management to those involved in the program that will eventually adhere to the program’s standard operating procedures.

Audience

The audience section of a patch management policy describes the parties to whom the policy is directed at.

In most cases, this is likely to include internal management and personnel, as well as external third party contractors.

Responsibility

The responsibility section of the policy outlines the chain of responsibility for all activities in the patch management program.

This should include the responsibilities of upper level management who are responsible for policy development and decision making all the way down to the IT personnel charged with carrying out the actual patch management procedures.

In the case that third party entities are involved in the day-to-day patch management activities, their roles and responsibilities should be clearly outlined in this section as well.

Policy Controls

The core of a patch management policy is defined by its security controls. Controls define the standard operating procedures (SOP) and performance expectations of the program itself.

These expectations include mitigation timeframes, mean time to recovery (MTTR) in the event of a failed update, communication channels, and SLAs for internal departments and third party vendors.

The main body of security controls also outlines any specific requirements for specific critical systems and data and formal compliance requirements that must be met.

Tips For Writing A Patch Management Policy

Before you prepare your patch management policies you should understand the task you are undertaking.

This preparation process includes uncovering the available resources that make the task easier and what critical functions a formal patch management policy should provide.

Start With A Template

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Patch management involves a fairly uniform set of activities for all organizations and thus patch management policies consist of fairly uniform components.

It’s best to start off with a tried, tested, and true set of policies from a reliable source.

You can start to build your patch management policy from PurpleSec’s free online template and then customize it to fit your organization’s unique IT environment and risk requirements.

Classify Your Data

Patch management activities are responsible for reducing the mean time to patch vulnerabilities and security updates that are responsible for protecting all systems and data within an organization.

However, critical systems may need to be treated with more urgency than non-critical systems.

Tailoring the policies to each organization, therefore, depends on having a complete and current inventory and risk classifications for all assets in order to meet an organization’s unique risk requirements.

System Restore

One of the biggest concerns for patch management is when updates cause system failure or reduced functionality.

Patch management policies need to clearly outline system restore procedures for rolling back an update in case of failure.

This includes defining acceptable target mean time to recover (MTTR) and SLAs that set time and state expectations for restoring a failed system.

Consider Production Environments

IT environments usually have both production and development systems, each having different types of vulnerabilities, risk requirements, and degrees of criticality to business operations.

Production systems require high availability while development systems are not as critical.

A well designed patch management policy needs to account for these differences and set appropriate expectations for both development and production systems.

Production systems may require fail-over clusters and load balancers to actively protect against downtime while updates are being installed.

Also, full backups must be available for production systems and staff should be proficient in rolling back changes should they fail.

Contrastingly, software within a development environment needs to match the production environment they are going to be used on, and DevOps often involves testing software on multiple OS versions and complex environments to identify potential incompatibilities encountered in the real world.

Remember, the bad guys don’t sleep, and neither should your security monitoring.

How To Enforce Patch Management Policies

Policies are nothing within themselves if they are not enforced.

It’s critical to maintain an appropriate set of technical controls that ensure policies are providing the protection they are designed to in order to ensure risk is being properly mitigated.

Step 1: Monitor Processes

Enforcing patch management policies depends on your ability to monitor the program’s activities and compare them to the actual policy requirements.

Monitoring also allows managers to collect data on the program and audit it to make improvements and effectively reduce vulnerability exposure time and overall cyber risk.

Step 2: Set Group Policies

Group Policies are a software security control in Microsoft Windows that allows system administrators to enforce access controls to domain services.

For patch management activities, Microsoft Group Policies should be configured using the principle of least privilege to allow access for patch management team members only during maintenance windows, and be further configured to manage shut down windows and ensure that updates are installed outside of normal business hours.

Learn More: Windows Patch Management Best Practices For 2023

Step 3: Implement A Patch Management Tool

Various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix) have tools that can be used to form the backbone of a patch management program.

These tools include Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Windows Server Update Services (Wsus), and Red Hat Satellite.

Each update management software includes admin controls and scheduling features to track patches, download and distribute them and can be used to support compliance requirements.

How PurpleSec Improves Patch Management

PurpleSec’s risk management platform for patch management provides a set of enterprise tools for mitigating cyber risk across an organization’s IT environment.

Our platform improves a traditional approach to vulnerability management by providing a more efficient and effective solution.

Security Tool Integration

PurpleSec offers continuous vulnerability assessment and remediation and improves patch management by integrating patching software and orchestrating patch management activities.

These activities include continuously scanning the network for vulnerabilities and available updates and automatically installing security patches.

The result is that vulnerability management no longer becomes just a patching process but instead a cyber security risk-based process supported by detailed vulnerability management reports.

Automated Patching

PurpleSec’s automated patch management solution converts vulnerabilities into fixes at a push of a button.

Through a simple integration, our system can drastically reduce the amount of time and effort required for maintaining a reliable enterprise patch management process.

Our solution turns weeks of coordinating vulnerability remediation into mere days, reducing exposure time and closing the gaps that attackers seek to exploit most.

Wrapping Up

Having a patch management policy is an important first step towards having a complete and reliable vulnerability management framework for your organization that can effectively and efficiently reduce cyber risk.

You don’t have to start from scratch either.

PurpleSec offers a patch management policy template that you can shape into a program that is customized to fit the unique risk remediation requirements at your organization.

For organizations that are ready for a next generation vulnerability management solution, PurpleSec’s platform delivers advanced continuous and automated vulnerability management capabilities that include patch management services.