If you only install patches after learning about a new vulnerability, is your security truly up to date? Reactive patching alone does not constitute proper risk management, especially in today’s distributed and BYOD environments.
However, this shortcoming is not an indictment of your IT team’s abilities. Rather, it’s a workflow issue that can be addressed with continuous visibility, prioritization, and automation.
With that in mind, let’s explore how to move from reactive patching to proactive risk management, what that shift looks like in practice, and how IT teams can operationalize it at scale.
Why Reactive Patching Keeps IT Teams in Firefighting Mode
While keeping endpoints and applications fully patched is important, reactive patching is a constant rush to stay ahead of vulnerabilities. This means that as soon as a patch is released, IT agents must rush to get it approved and deployed across multiple endpoints, resulting in lengthy processes to manage a large number of devices.
While Patch Tuesday cycles and similar patch drops may help centralize and release all patches at once, they can also create large backlogs with limited context for each patch. This leads to a sense of urgency and a lack of strategy or prioritization for patch deployment.
With that said, what’s the difference between reactive patching and proactive patch management? Common signs of reactive patching include:
Patching only after alerts or incidents, rather than proactively keeping everything updated.
Treating all vulnerabilities as equal, as opposed to prioritizing the most critical patches and vulnerabilities.
Relying on manual checks or delayed tools, instead of real-time monitoring and updates.
Lack of ownership between IT and security, rather than having clear responsibilities laid out.
The Gap Between Patching and Risk Management
While staying up to date on patches is important for security, IT compliance, and risk management, it’s only one piece of the puzzle and must be considered within the broader context of your overall security posture.
Patches Do Not Equal Risk Reduction
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are an important input for assessing risk, but CVE counts alone are a poor indicator of actual exposure. IT and security teams also need to consider factors such as exploitability and the impact of affected assets to properly assess risk and prioritize which vulnerabilities to address first.
Point-in-Time Visibility Breaks Down Quickly
Security requires ongoing, real-time visibility, not just point-in-time snapshots. Weekly, monthly, or (even worse) quarterly scans fail in modern, dynamic environments, and create large gaps in visibility where vulnerabilities can persist unnoticed between scans. Add to this the risk posed by unmanaged devices, along with the additional risks you accept with every third-party application, and you need continuous visibility to protect your endpoints and network.
Manual Prioritization Does Not Scale
How do you gauge risk and prioritize threats? Spreadsheets can be inconsistent, and ad hoc judgment based on limited data (or worse, gut feelings) can be exceedingly unreliable. Poor prioritization not only exposes your systems to additional risks but also impacts your operations and wastes time on low-priority patches. You need tools that can assess and prioritize threats against your policies, so you can identify the most significant ones.
What Proactive Risk Management Actually Looks Like
If reactive patching isn’t sufficient, what does the alternative look like? Proactive risk management takes an active approach to monitoring and managing endpoints and systems to ensure they’re protected against all threats at all times.
Proactive risk management includes:
Continuous visibility into devices, operating systems, and third-party software, to quickly detect threats in real-time.
Risk-based prioritization that calculates threats based on CVEs, severity, and exposure, so IT teams can focus on the threats that matter most.
Automation tools to reduce decision fatigue and manual effort, freeing up time for agents to focus on more pressing issues while carrying out tasks quickly.
Feedback loops that confirm remediation and reduce repeat issues, so you can verify security and have clear records for audits.
Shifting From Patch Volume to Risk-Based Prioritization
If you’re ready to embrace risk-based prioritization, the first step is to change your perspective. Rather than focusing on deploying a large volume of patches as quickly as possible, prioritize the most critical threats first.
Risk-based prioritization requires evaluating vulnerabilities through multiple lenses, not just severity scores.
Not All Vulnerabilities Deserve the Same Urgency
While all vulnerabilities should be addressed sooner rather than later, not all pose the same threat. The Common Vulnerability Severity System (CVSS) is a good source for identifying which vulnerabilities are the most critical, but you’ll also need to consider the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited and the impact it could have on your business. This will help prioritize vulnerabilities so critical ones receive the urgency they deserve, and less critical ones can wait.
Asset Context Changes Everything
The asset a vulnerability is on can be just as important as the vulnerability itself. If a dormant device has a vulnerable app, it may not pose much of a threat, especially when compared to the same vulnerability on a critical endpoint. You’ll need to consider the context of the vulnerability, including the device’s owner, its usage, and its environment, to prioritize which endpoints need immediate remediation.
Timing Matters More Than Completion Rates
Incomplete patching is better than no patching at all, and while you’ll want to ensure each patch is fully deployed, delaying patches leaves your systems completely exposed. Be sure to track your time-to-remediate (the average time to resolve vulnerabilities) to determine whether you’re addressing vulnerabilities quickly enough; every moment a device is left vulnerable is another opportunity for cybercriminals to strike.
How Automation Enables Proactive Risk Management
Automation is one of the most helpful tools for proactive risk management. Automating tasks such as threat detection and patch deployment enables faster response times without compromising your standards and provides consistent security across endpoints.
Automation allows IT teams to apply consistent controls across endpoints without increasing manual workload or operational overhead. Benefits of proper automation include:
Policy-driven patching to automatically prioritize and deploy patches based on your guidelines.
Real-time remediation triggers to help IT and security teams quickly address issues and vulnerabilities.
Reduced dependency on maintenance windows to provide consistent, ongoing monitoring and support, rather than point-in-time snapshots.
Fewer manual handoffs between teams, thus improving efficiency across the board.
Where Splashtop AEM Fits Into a Proactive Risk Strategy
When you need more visibility and control over your endpoints and security, look for an endpoint management solution like Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management). With Splashtop AEM, IT agents can protect, manage, and update endpoints across a network, with automation tools that provide ongoing visibility and rapid patch management.
Splashtop AEM uses CVE-based threat detection to automatically identify risks and vulnerabilities and provide remediation suggestions. When new patches are released, Splashtop AEM can automatically detect and deploy them across endpoints, prioritizing patches and endpoints based on your company’s policy.
This makes Splashtop AEM a powerful tool for ensuring security across distributed and BYOD environments, as it assists IT agents in everyday tasks and provides ongoing threat monitoring and management. Its patch automation helps teams promptly deploy patches across operating systems and third-party applications, whether they normally deploy patches manually, need a patch management solution to supplement Microsoft Intune, or want to enhance their Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software.
Measuring Progress Beyond Patch Compliance
Of course, patch compliance isn’t the only metric you need to track. There are several factors to consider when measuring your proactive risk management, each of which can indicate different needs or areas for improvement.
Risk management metrics include:
Mean time to remediate high-risk vulnerabilities: how quickly can you address the most severe threats? The faster the mean time to remediation, the better your strategies are working.
Reduction in repeat incidents tied to known vulnerabilities: If you’re continually encountering incidents from a known vulnerability, that means it’s not being addressed properly. A reduction in repeat incidents is a sign that you’re addressing the vulnerabilities properly.
Coverage gaps over time: Once you start using endpoint management and automation, the coverage gaps should begin to steadily decrease. If large gaps remain, you may need to reassess your strategies.
Confidence during audits and security reviews: Endpoint management software such as Splashtop AEM includes reporting and records that help demonstrate security and IT compliance. If you’re using it right, you’ll be ready to pass audits with greater ease and confidence.
Embracing Proactive Risk Management
Proactive risk management is more than just a change in processes; it’s also a change in mindset. You need to reevaluate how you protect and manage endpoints, prioritize patches, and detect threats, then actively shift from “reactive” to “proactive.”
A proactive approach depends on visibility, prioritization, and automation to keep endpoints secure at all times. Embracing an endpoint management solution like Splashtop AEM will give you the tools you need to keep each device in your network safe and supported.
Splashtop AEM provides IT teams with the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workload. 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.
Ready to embrace proactive risk management? Get started with a free trial of Splashtop AEM today:
