Q&A: Streamlining Your Patch Management Strategy

November 2nd, 2010

Andrew Jaquith

John Kindervag

With contributors:

Summary

Forrester continues to receive many customer inquiries related to effective patch management of servers and endpoints. Balancing the urgency of patching with the need to minimize employee downtime and frustration can be difficult without the right strategy. Although patching the Windows operating system is less of a problem today, exploits continue to affect popular third-party applications such as Adobe Reader. As the frequency of vulnerabilities increases, security professionals are revisiting patch-related processes and the technologies that support them. This report identifies six questions that customers ask Forrester about their patch management processes. To manage vendor patches successfully, security professionals must be able to understand which systems to patch, test patches in a timely fashion, streamline their service-level agreements (SLAs), and agree with business units on a strategy for testing third-party applications.

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