Patch management is an essential part of maintaining secure IT environments. It addresses vulnerabilities, keeps devices up-to-date with the latest security and performance improvements, and helps ensure IT compliance. Yet all too often, businesses neglect their patch management metrics and fail to monitor their patches.
Tracking patch management metrics and KPIs is a useful way for IT teams to optimize their patching processes, improve security, and ensure compliance with all relevant standards and regulations. So with that in mind, let’s examine the key metrics for effective patch management, why they matter, and how solutions like Splashtop AEM make it easy to monitor these metrics.
Why Tracking Metrics & KPIs Is Crucial for Patch Management
You might be wondering: “Why is tracking patch management KPIs so important?” It’s easy to think that patch management is a simple matter of installing updates and moving on, but it’s actually an important process that can impact efficiency and productivity across an organization. After all, if patches take too long to install or encounter unexpected compatibility issues, it could cost employees time and cause unforeseen downtime. Skipping patch updates, meanwhile, leads to cybersecurity risks.
Patch management metrics provide essential insights into the effectiveness of the patching process. This helps organizations stay productive, mitigate vulnerabilities, and improve their overall security, while guiding IT teams to make informed decisions when installing patches.
For instance, some key metrics for effective patch management include the time it takes to detect and install patches (the average time to remediation). Understanding these KPIs helps IT teams ensure their patch management process is efficient and enables them to address vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. This data-driven approach helps teams improve their patching processes and reduce the risk of data breaches, which is vital for security and IT compliance.
Top 10 Patch Management Metrics to Monitor
With that in mind, it’s time to look at the key patch management metrics you’ll want to monitor. These KPIs will provide valuable insights into your patch deployment process, areas where it can and should be improved, and obstacles you’ll want to avoid.
Patch management KPIs to monitor include:
1. Patch Deployment Frequency
First, consider the frequency and regularity of your patch deployments (also known as the patching cadence). A good patching frequency helps ensure you’re keeping up with new patches, thus reducing the time your endpoints and systems spend unpatched and vulnerable.
2. Patch Response Time
How quickly are you patching your endpoints? It’s essential to track the time it takes to patch, from the moment the vulnerability is discovered to the deployment of the patch. This helps determine how quick and responsive your company’s patch management process is. A quick response time indicates effective patch management and risk mitigation, but a slower time is a sign that it needs improvement.
3. Percentage of Systems Patched
When you patch your endpoints, you must ensure every device is covered; leaving any devices or systems unpatched creates massive vulnerabilities that cyberattackers can exploit. As such, it helps to track the percentage of systems patched to gain a full view of patch coverage across your IT infrastructure. This provides a clear indication of how thorough your patch management process is and can identify any endpoints that still require updates.
4. Number of Failed Patch Applications
Occasionally, patches don’t get installed properly and need to be reinstalled. However, if that happens frequently, it could be a sign of problems that must be addressed. Tracking the number of failed patches can identify issues with the patch management process, so IT teams can address them and improve the process. This helps maintain full patch coverage across an organization and boosts patching efficiency.
5. Track Re-Patched Vulnerabilities
There are times when vulnerabilities that have been patched once need to be patched again. Tracking these instances helps understand how effective your initial patching efforts are and identify areas for improvement for your patch testing and deployment.
6. Compliance with Patch Standards
Keeping endpoints and systems fully updated and patched is an important requirement for IT compliance. Tracking your patch compliance rate metric indicates how well you’re maintaining your security in compliance with these guidelines, so you can demonstrate you’re meeting your compliance standards and following best practices.
7. Track Critical Vulnerability Patches
Some vulnerabilities are more dangerous than others, and it’s critical to patch these high-priority vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. Tracking your critical vulnerabilities patched can show how well you’re addressing severe prompts quickly and can help guide your vulnerability management efforts.
8. User Device Patch Compliance
Patch management is a shared responsibility – users must do their part by installing updates when they become available, rather than constantly clicking “remind me later.” Tracking your end-user patch compliance shows how successful your policies are at keeping endpoints updated and helps ensure full, comprehensive security coverage.
9. Success Rate of Patch Testing
When you begin installing patches, you need to test them to ensure they work properly on your devices and don’t cause any unexpected issues. Tracking the success rate of these patches helps ensure that you’ll be able to deploy them properly across a wider environment or identify issues that need to be addressed before the patches are installed elsewhere.
10. Instances of Patch Rollbacks
If patching goes wrong and you need to roll it back, it could be a sign of underlying issues that your IT team should address. Measuring how often you have to roll back patches provides important insights into the stability of your patches and helps identify potential issues within your IT environment.
How Can Key Metrics Be Integrated into Patch Management Strategies?
It’s clear that several important KPIs can provide valuable insights into patch management and security compliance. As such, tracking patch management metrics should be part of your overall security strategies.
Patch management KPIs help you identify weaknesses and areas for improvement in your patch management process, so you can refine the process and provide more thorough coverage. This constant assessment is key to maintaining a fully updated endpoint environment and ensuring your patch management process follows best practices.
Additionally, these metrics can help provide important data for your overall security posture. For instance, integrating patch management and vulnerability management metrics provides a more complete view of your security, so you can meet your compliance requirements and ensure thorough security across your organization.
From Manual Fixes to Automated Security: The Evolution of Patching
Patch management used to be a time-consuming manual process with little visibility into its progress. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case. Today, automated patch management solutions make it easy to patch endpoints, operating systems, and applications across remote environments from a single place.
When organizations rely on manual patching, they need IT agents to constantly check for updates, then go to each device, start the patch installation, and then wait to make sure it’s properly installed and error-free. This is a slow, repetitive process that wastes time and resources, and it’s prone to human error.
However, with a solution like Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management), you can automatically detect new patches, test and deploy them across devices, and ensure each patch is properly installed without needing manual intervention. This saves time, eliminates human error, and provides efficient patch rollouts across all endpoints.
Secure & Automate Your Patch Management with Splashtop AEM
Patch management should be simple and efficient. With Splashtop AEM, it can be. Splashtop AEM streamlines patch management across remote environments with automated, real-time updates across operating systems and third-party applications. IT teams can create customized, policy-based patching strategies, complete with version approvals and update rings to ensure each patch is tested, controlled, and deployed in the manner that suits them best.
Additionally, Splashtop AEM uses AI-powered CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) insights to proactively identify and address vulnerabilities with real-time alerts and Smart Actions. IT teams can also manage and monitor everything from a single dashboard, which provides visibility into endpoint health, patch statuses, IT compliance, and more.
While manual updates can often interrupt workdays to install new patches, Splashtop AEM can schedule updates at convenient times, allowing work to continue uninterrupted. Its background actions also enable IT teams to access system tools like task managers and remote commands without interrupting end-users, keeping disruptions and downtime to a minimum.
Splashtop AEM gives IT teams the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workloads. This includes:
Automated patching for OS, third-party, and custom apps.
AI-powered CVE-based vulnerability insights.
Customizable policy frameworks that can be enforced throughout your network.
Hardware and software inventory tracking and management across all endpoints.
Alerts and remediation to automatically resolve issues before they become problems.
Background actions to access tools like task managers and device managers without interrupting users.
Want to experience Splashtop AEM for yourself? Get started with a free trial today.
