Patch Management for Education: Guide for IT Teams

Patch management for education is challenging because schools and universities often support large device fleets, shared computers, remote users, third-party learning tools, and limited IT resources. Keeping those systems updated is essential, but updates must also be deployed without disrupting classes, testing windows, administrative work, or remote learning.

This guide explains why patch management matters in education, what makes it difficult, and how IT teams can use automation, visibility, and prioritization to keep school devices secure and up to date.

Patch Management in Today's Education Environment

Today, technology creates a core part of the educational experience, both on campus and via remote learning. While students can use distance learning tools to attend classes from anywhere, schools and universities also rely on learning management systems (LMS), online grading tools, cloud-based educational software, and more.

Even the student portal is a key technology for handling student information, class registration, tuition payments, and more.

However, each piece of technology also creates new risks, as vulnerabilities could give attackers access to entire systems, personal data, and more. Additionally, many of these systems can be accessed from a variety of endpoints and accounts, making security even more essential.

IT teams have to work quickly to ensure each application, system, and endpoint is properly secured. Without proactive, automated patch management, this can be a challenge for teams of any size.

Why Educational Institutions Are High-Value Targets for Cyberattacks

According to the UK’s 2025 Cyber Security Breaches Survey, 91% of higher education institutions and 85% of further education colleges identified breaches or attacks in the past year. This puts them well above the 43% average for businesses overall.

So, what is it that makes educational institutions such an appealing target?

First, there’s the sheer amount of sensitive data they contain. Colleges, universities, and other institutions hold student records, financial aid information, health info, and so much more, all of which is highly sensitive.

Then there’s the level of security to consider. While large enterprises, government organizations, and other big-name targets may have sizable IT and cybersecurity teams, educational institutions rarely have comparable budgets. As a result, they often have limited IT resources and smaller security teams, which makes them easier to attack.

Thanks to this combination of factors, educational institutions are tempting targets for cybercriminals, and one of the first ways they can attack is by targeting unpatched vulnerabilities.

Key Patch Management Challenges Every Education IT Team Faces

There are several challenges that can make patch management tricky, which institutions must address in order to support robust patching.

Common patch management challenges include:

• Legacy systems: Many universities and other institutions rely on older systems that may be costly or challenging to replace. These may lack the modern patching tools and security updates they need, forcing teams to try to balance security and operational continuity.

• BYOD and student-owned devices: Students, faculty, and staff may access school systems from personally owned devices that IT teams do not fully control. This makes it important to separate what IT can manage directly from what must be handled through access policies, enrollment requirements, and user guidance

• Limited IT headcount and budget: Small IT teams often have a lot to juggle, especially for large educational institutions, and don’t always have the budget for the workforce or tools they need. This means that keeping up with security and patching can be a struggle, and it’s easy to fall behind.

• Seasonal disruption: Once summer ends, new students pour onto campus. This creates a flood of new endpoints and accounts to secure, as well as new potential security risks.

• Distributed endpoints: With remote learning and cloud technology, IT teams need to secure devices that aren’t always on campus. Managing distributed and remote endpoints can introduce a new set of challenges, which not all IT teams are equipped to address.

What Educational Institutions Gain from Getting Patching Right

Given these challenges, it could be easy to write off proactive patch management as too much of an expense or hassle. However, that would be doing the institution a disservice, as patch management offers several major benefits.

These include:

1. Reduced breach risk: Proactive patch management can quickly address vulnerabilities and deploy patches across endpoints. Doing so improves the overall security posture and reduces the risk of data breaches, helping to keep networks and users secure.

2. Compliance readiness: Educational institutions may need to support requirements tied to FERPA, GLBA, and other security or privacy obligations. Robust patch management can help IT teams document updates, reduce known vulnerabilities, and maintain clearer records of endpoint security activity.

3. Reduced downtime: Strong cybersecurity helps improve uptime across institutions. Cyber threats and attacks can lead to unplanned downtime as IT teams struggle to stop the attacks and repair the damage, but with proper patching, that doesn’t become an issue in the first place.

4. Improved efficiency: Good patch management enhances efficiency for IT teams and institutions alike. With automated, proactive patch management, IT teams can quickly keep endpoints secure, freeing up time that they can use to focus on other issues and resolve queries more quickly.

Mitigating Security Vulnerabilities in Education Through Automated Patching

Given the importance of patch management, how can IT teams at educational institutions ensure devices remain up to date across their networks and beyond campus? Automated patching is a key factor here, as it helps keep endpoints and applications up to date without needing manual intervention.

There are several benefits to a good patch management solution, including:

1. Automation: Patch management tools can automatically detect, test, prioritize, and deploy updates, even across remote environments. This helps ensure updates are rolled out promptly while saving time for IT teams.

2. Centralization: Patch management software centralizes patch management by empowering IT teams to control updates across endpoints from a single location. This helps enforce policies across the network and maintain visibility into all devices, enabling quick detection of vulnerabilities so they can be addressed.

3. Testing: A good patch management solution includes test groups, allowing IT teams to deploy updates to a small group of devices first to detect potential issues. This helps identify problems well before the update rolls out across a wider fleet of endpoints.

4. Staged rollouts: With automated patch management, you can schedule updates in staged rollouts so they deploy across select groups of devices at a steady pace rather than all at once. This helps ensure updates are properly installed and minimizes disruptions by scheduling them at convenient times.

5. Third-party app patching: Updates are for more than just operating systems. A good patch management solution should include both OS and third-party app patching, as outdated apps can have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

6. Support for approved remote devices: A proper patch management solution should help IT teams manage updates across school-owned devices, faculty and staff endpoints, and approved remote devices. For personally owned devices, patching usually depends on enrollment, permissions, and the institution’s device management policies.

How to Build a Practical Patch Management Process for Education

A strong patch management process helps education IT teams keep devices updated without disrupting classes, testing windows, remote learning, or administrative work. The process should be repeatable, visible, and easy to manage across school-owned and approved remote devices.

1. Inventory managed endpoints and applications: Identify the devices your IT team is responsible for maintaining, including classroom computers, lab machines, faculty and staff devices, administrative systems, and remote endpoints. Track installed software as well, since outdated third-party apps can create security gaps.

2. Identify missing OS and third-party updates: Review which operating system and application updates are missing across the environment. This should include browsers, productivity tools, conferencing apps, PDF readers, and other software commonly used by students, faculty, and staff.

3. Prioritize patches by risk and device role: Focus first on high-severity vulnerabilities, actively exploited issues, and devices that support sensitive data or critical operations. This helps IT teams use limited time effectively instead of treating every update as equal.

4. Test higher-risk updates before broad deployment: Use a small test group before rolling out updates that could affect labs, testing environments, specialized software, or administrative systems. This reduces the risk of widespread disruption.

5. Schedule rollouts around school operations: Deploy updates during maintenance windows, after hours, breaks, or other low-impact periods when possible. Staged rollouts can also help IT teams control timing and catch issues early.

6. Track failed patches and remediate quickly: Monitor patch status after deployment to see which updates succeeded and which failed. Failed patches should be retried, investigated, or remediated quickly so devices do not remain exposed.

7. Review patch status for reporting and audit readiness: Regularly review patch reports, missing updates, and remediation activity. This helps IT teams document their process and maintain clearer visibility across the endpoint environment.

Core Features to Evaluate in a Patch Management Solution for Education

While patch management is essential for strong cybersecurity, not all patch management tools include the same features. There are several key features that are important for good patch management and automation, so teams looking to invest in patch management should make sure they include these:

• Automated OS and third-party app patching: Patch automation is one of the most important parts of patch management, but it should also encompass both operating systems and third-party apps. This helps ensure full patch coverage without taking up IT resources.

• Remote deployment: Being able to deploy patches across remote endpoints is key to keeping devices secure wherever the user goes. It’s essential to find a solution with proper remote patch deployment capabilities, so IT teams can manage devices when students, faculty, and staff are on the go.

• Real-time visibility: Having visibility into each endpoint can help ensure devices and applications are properly up to date. Without real-time visibility, users get only point-in-time snapshots of compliance at best, or fly blind at worst.

• Support for distributed devices: It’s important to choose a solution that supports a wide range of endpoints and operating systems, including school-owned devices, faculty and staff devices, and approved remote endpoints.

• Compliance reporting and logs: Being able to demonstrate IT compliance can be just as important as maintaining it. Look for a solution that keeps clear logs of updates, incidents, and exceptions to better demonstrate compliance during security audits.

• Scalability: A good platform should be able to scale and meet the users’ needs as the institution grows, new faculty members join, and more students enroll. Without a scalable solution, it’ll be tricky to keep up with changes over time.

Education Patch Management with Splashtop AEM

When you need a robust, secure, and reliable automated patch management solution, Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management) can help.

With Splashtop AEM, IT teams can identify missing OS and third-party app updates, prioritize vulnerabilities, deploy patches across managed devices, and track patch status from a centralized console. This helps schools and universities reduce manual patching work while maintaining clearer visibility into endpoint risk.

Splashtop AEM also supports reporting and logs that help IT teams document patching activity, review failed updates, and support audit readiness. Combined with Splashtop’s remote support capabilities, IT teams can troubleshoot endpoint issues more efficiently when patches fail or devices need attention.

Ready to simplify patch management for your education IT environment? Start a free trial of Splashtop AEM today.