Your organization is unique. So is your IT team and their approach to managing the IT estate. But what isn’t unique are the vulnerabilities in your environment. They affect every organization. And in the current state of the world, where teams are scattered and scrambling to get their organizations up and running, vulnerabilities are ever more glaring. No matter how well you stay on top of threats, hackers find new ways to exploit compromised software.

Today, only one in ten patches for vulnerable software gets deployed. Does that mean that ninety percent of my vulnerable software titles are at risk? Not necessarily. If prioritized effectively, that 10 percent might be enough. One in ten may not seem challenging at first. But many organizations have more than 5,000—even upwards of 10,000—applications they manage. For those companies, 10 percent isn’t insignificant. How can anyone manage that many patches?

Consider automation

Even with patch automation, it’s still necessary to test and validate updates so they don’t have an unexpected effect on your endpoints and critical applications. So while you can accomplish more with patch automation, prioritization is still a primary key to success.

Effective remediation

When prioritizing patches, it’s essential to focus your teams on the most impactful items while keeping in mind several critical areas.

• Prevalence—How many systems would benefit from a security update? Focus on vulnerabilities installed on the most machines in the organization
• Asset sensitivity—What systems would result in the most risk if compromised? Address vulnerabilities found on the most sensitive devices in the organization
• Vulnerability criticality—How bad could it affect your security if left unpatched? Deal with vulnerabilities that have the highest risk, if exploited
• Likelihood of exploitation—How likely is it to be exploited? Zero in on vulnerabilities that are at the highest risk of being targeted in the wild

Combining some or all of these elements when you prioritize patches will help to reduce the volume of patches you need to deploy, making the job of remediating software vulnerabilities more manageable. And that’s more important that ever as businesses attempt to cover more ground with less resources available.

Do more with what you have

Patch automation for Software Vulnerability Manager helps organizations overwhelmed by the threat landscape. With automation, you can publish patches for the applications that affect your environment faster and patch even more vulnerabilities to lower your risk further, if necessary.

You don’t want to automate your entire patching process. But automating routine items that take up valuable time and resources allows teams in charge of remediation to focus on more complex applications, getting more done by making existing staff more efficient.

Find out more about intelligent patch automation from Flexera.