TL;DR: Patch management and vulnerability management are closely connected but not identical. Patch management focuses on planning, testing, and deploying updates to fix bugs and security flaws, while vulnerability management focuses on identifying, assessing, prioritizing, remediating, and monitoring weaknesses across an environment. In practice, vulnerability management tells IT teams what needs attention, and patch management is often how they fix it. Together, both processes help sysadmins reduce risk, strengthen security, and keep systems stable.
Patch management and vulnerability management often get lumped together because they both help reduce security risk. But they answer different questions: Patch management asks, “What updates do we need to deploy?” Vulnerability management asks, “What risks exist in our environment, and which ones should we fix first?”
How are patch management and vulnerability management different?
Patch management is one type of remediation within a broader vulnerability management program. Vulnerability management identifies and prioritizes security weaknesses across an environment, while patch management deploys updates that fix some of those weaknesses.
Category | Patch management | Vulnerability management |
|---|---|---|
Main goal | Deploy updates that fix known issues. | Identify, prioritize, remediate, and monitor security weaknesses. |
Core question | What updates do we need to deploy? | What risks exist, and which ones should we fix first? |
Scope | Narrower. Focuses on software, operating system, firmware, and device updates. | Broader. Covers vulnerabilities across assets, software, systems, and configurations. |
Process | Plan, test, and deploy patches. | Inventory, assess, prioritize, remediate, and monitor vulnerabilities. |
Primary output | Updated systems with installed patches. | A prioritized view of vulnerabilities and remediation actions. |
How they work together | Patch management is often the fix. | Vulnerability management often identifies what needs fixing. |
How does the patch management process work?
The patch management process involves planning, testing, and deploying updates that fix security vulnerabilities, software bugs, and system issues. For sysadmins, it’s a critical workflow for keeping devices secure, stable, and supported.
We can break down patch management into three main steps: plan, test, and deploy.
Automate patching with PDQ Connect
Keep Windows & macOS devices patched and secure from the cloud.
1. Plan
When you’re in the planning stage, you’ll look at your asset inventory to get a bird’s-eye view of what’s in your environment. From there, you can see which software or hardware versions are outdated. This will help you determine which patches you need to keep your environment in shipshape.
2. Test
Next, you’ll test each security patch in your environment. As we all know, the golden rule of IT is (say it with me) never deploy something to prod until you test the tar out of it.
Round up a small group of computers (preferably from different departments) to deploy patches to. Did anything break? If not, move right along to large-scale deployment. If so, congratulations — you’ve got only a handful of computers to fix rather than your entire fleet!
3. Deploy
Once you test those patches and confirm that nothing has broken, you can deploy the patches to your devices. Again, you’ll want to keep a watchful eye on your environment to make sure the patches don’t break anything. And because you already tested the patches on a small, representative group of devices, the likelihood that something will break is minimized — and if something does break, there’s a good chance it’ll be a smaller group of machines rather than your whole environment.
Why is patch management important for cybersecurity?
Patch management is important for three main reasons:
It strengthens your cybersecurity posture.
It fixes bugs in your software or hardware.
It increases your team’s productivity.
Patching strengthens your cybersecurity posture
When you run outdated programs in your environment, you’re slapping down a red carpet for hackers to mosey on down. Vendors release patches when they discover a flaw or security vulnerability in their software. And sometimes, that flaw can open up the door for external cyberthreats.
Hackers love an easy way in. It’s up to us to make their lives less enjoyable.
Patches also fix bugs
You know that one annoying bug in that one program that adds an extra character every time you type? Vendors release patches to fix those pesky bugs. As a result, the software improves, which directly correlates to your work life improving. Sometimes, it’s the little things.
Patches increase productivity
And with fixed bugs and fewer extra characters comes a productivity increase. Plus, patches sometimes include additional features for your favorite platforms. If you never update your software, you’ll be stuck with the original version you purchased. And you know from experience how tech giants struggle to leave their programs alone once released.
How does the vulnerability management process work?
Vulnerability management is the process of finding, assessing, prioritizing, remediating, and monitoring security weaknesses in your environment. In other words, it tells you what needs fixing before patch management helps you fix it.
Note that vulnerability management is not a fun manual experience. We recommend implementing a vulnerability management solution to automate some of the processes.
Find and fix vulnerabilities faster
PDQ helps IT teams simplify vulnerability management from detection to remediation. Spot, prioritize, and remediate CVEs from anywhere. View vulnerabilities by device or software. Then filter by risk, severity, affected software, impacted devices, and more to identify high-priority exposures and patches.
1. Inventory
Much like with patch management, you’ll begin vulnerability management by looking at your asset inventory. But this time, you’ll look at it through the lens of vulnerabilities.
See a breaking news story about a major vulnerability? You can use your asset inventory to know if the news impacts you — and to what extent. But oftentimes, your vulnerability management solution will already be on top of it (unless it’s breaking breaking news).
You can also use a vulnerability scanner to take an in-depth look at your environment. Vulnerability scanning helps you identify known vulnerabilities across your devices, which significantly decreases the manual work in the process.
2. Assess
Next, you’ll assess what each known vulnerability means to you and your unique environment through a vulnerability assessment. Just because the world is panicked over a vulnerability doesn’t mean it’s a red-alert crisis for you. For example, a critical vulnerability that allows remote code execution is terrifying ... but maybe not so much if the impacted program is on a computer that doesn’t connect to the internet.
3. Prioritize
Now that you have some context around your identified vulnerabilities, you can prioritize them. To prioritize vulnerabilities, choose the vulnerabilities that could potentially do the most harm and address them first. For example, that private computer I described in the last section? Small potatoes in comparison to the zero-day that impacts your public-facing computers.
4. Remediate
With your tidy prioritized list in hand, you can work on remediating vulnerabilities. This is where vulnerability management and patch management meet in the middle. To remediate vulnerabilities, you patch them. At this point, patch management takes over.
Usually. But in some cases (like with zero days), you might not be able to spring into action as quickly. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a sitting duck, either.
If a patch isn’t available yet and the vulnerability is serious, you move on to plan B: implementing a workaround. For example, disabling a specific service, port, or setting can sometimes be enough to keep you safe while vendors develop a patch.
Or, you can just shut down all your servers and devices and leave for the day. We wouldn’t recommend it, but there's no denying the temptation is there.
5. Monitor
After deployment, verify that patches installed successfully and monitor for issues.
And then, the cycle repeats. You’ll monitor for additional vulnerabilities (hopefully with the help of a vulnerability management tool) and address the critical ones as quickly as possible.
Why is vulnerability management important for cybersecurity?
Vulnerability management matters because it helps IT teams find and prioritize security weaknesses before attackers exploit them. By identifying affected assets, assessing risk, and guiding remediation, vulnerability management helps sysadmins focus on the issues most likely to impact their environment.
When should you use patch management vs. vulnerability management?
Use patch management when you need to deploy available updates that fix known software, operating system, firmware, or device issues. Use vulnerability management when you need to discover risks, understand which assets are affected, prioritize remediation, and track whether those risks have been resolved.
In practice, most IT teams use both:
Use patch management to test and deploy updates after vendors release fixes.
Use vulnerability management to find exposed assets, prioritize critical vulnerabilities, and confirm remediation.
Use both together when a vulnerability has an available patch and poses meaningful risk to your environment.
Patch management and vulnerability management FAQs
What is a patch?
A patch is an update for software, devices, or operating systems that fixes a known error. These known errors could be glitches or bugs as well as vulnerabilities.
What does the patching process entail?
The patching process consists of three main steps:
Plan, which means identifying the assets in your environment and discovering which available patches are relevant to you
Test, which means selecting a group of computers to deploy patches to before deploying those patches to prod
Deploy, which means — you guessed it — actually deploying relevant patches to the devices in your environment.
What is a vulnerability?
A vulnerability is a weakness or error in software, hardware, a network, or a system. Vulnerabilities threaten businesses because cybercriminals often leverage them to launch cyberattacks.
What is a vulnerability scan?
A vulnerability scan is the process of searching for and flagging vulnerabilities in an environment. For example, a vulnerability scan might flag a software vulnerability that impacts software a user in your network has installed. From here, you can download the software update or missing patches that address the vulnerability (if a solution exists).
To automate the process, security pros often task vulnerability scans to vulnerability scanners. These usually result in a vulnerability scan report, which tells you how to act on the vulnerabilities that exist in your environment.
Do all vulnerabilities need to be patched?
No, not all vulnerabilities need to be patched — at least not right away. Although vulnerabilities are ranked for their severity, that ranking is generalized and geared toward many — not all — organizations. And that level of severity could be very different for your unique environment.
For example, a vulnerability with a CVSS score of 10 might not be critical in your environment to you if the vulnerability lives on an isolated, disconnected machine. And while we’d patch all vulnerabilities in an ideal world, realistically, we have to prioritize the patches with the greatest potential impact on our environment. (In other words, if a high-severity vulnerability is announced and it impacts your environment, patch ASAP!)
