The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many businesses to adopt remote work or hybrid work. Protecting these remote and hybrid workers is much more difficult as compared to in-house employees as your security team lacks visibility. This makes remote and hybrid workers more vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and data breaches.
What can businesses do to minimize the risk of cybersecurity threats for remote and hybrid workers? By adopting an automated patch management strategy. Pushing patches for security vulnerabilities faster can minimize the risk of attackers exploiting those vulnerabilities as threat actors have less time to take advantage of these loopholes.
In this article, Anti-Dos will share how AI-powered patch management can protect your employees.
Table of Contents
How Automated Patch Management Can Protect Your Employees?
7. Predictive Patch Scheduling
What the Data Shows?
According to patch management statistics, 71% of cybersecurity teams consider patch management cumbersome and time-consuming. 62% of security professionals admit that patch management takes a back seat. 57% said that remote work and decentralized workspaces make things even worse. To add insult to injury, 61% of security teams are caught off guard and take a reactive approach to patch management instead of a proactive one. 58% of commonly exploited vulnerabilities push security teams into reactive mode. To top it all off, 52% of endpoints are not fully patched.
How Automated Patch Management Can Protect Your Employees?
Here are some of the ways in which automated patch management can protect your remote workers.
- Reduce Security Risk
Patch management in general and AI-based patch management in particular can minimize the security risk of your organization. It plugs in the security holes as soon as they are found leaving little to no room for malicious actors to exploit them. This can prevent business disruption just like best DDoS protection services and keep your business functioning. Additionally, you don’t have to bear the financial losses and reputation damage that come with data breaches.
- Minimizes Costs
As your IT infrastructure becomes more complex, more vulnerabilities can emerge. Fixing dozens or hundreds of vulnerabilities manually can increase the overhead cost and can be a time-consuming process. By automating the patch management process, you can reduce the cost substantially and save a lot of time as well. Optimizing your patch management process can also slash your costs.
- Save Time
As mentioned before, fixing each vulnerability individually can take a lot of time and effort. You have to first identify them and release patches for each vulnerability. Adopting a manual approach to patch management can prolong the process, which kills the whole purpose of patch management. You don’t only have to fix vulnerabilities but you have to do them quickly before they can be exploited by cybercriminals.
- Visibility and Control
Endpoints can become a soft target for threat actors as businesses don’t have visibility and control over them. Some businesses don’t even maintain an inventory of endpoints and devices. As a result, they lack visibility into their own endpoints which are left unattended. Attackers usually target those endpoints and use it as a ladder to target other devices.
Thanks to automated patch management, businesses can not only enjoy full control and visibility over their endpoints but they also know complete details about each point along with its configuration. This is the reason why automated patch management software is growing in popularity with each passing day.
- Patch Prioritization
With so many different vulnerabilities popping up every month, it can become a daunting challenge to prioritize them. You don’t want your business to delay a patch for a critical vulnerability and spend time fixing a less critical vulnerability. What really makes AI and machine learning technologies special is their ability to identify useful patterns from huge data sets after analyzing them. You can put it to good use in patch management by letting it analyze vulnerability data and decide which patches need to be installed first.
- Regulatory Compliance
Another perk of automated patch management is that it can free up your security team’s time which can put to good use in other areas such as documentation and analysis and preparing reports. Since these are the primary requirements for ensuring compliance with cybersecurity standards and regulatory bodies, it can increase your chances to comply with these standards.
- Predictive Patch Scheduling
If your cybersecurity system detects malicious activity, you can schedule a patch for it via automated patch management. You can even scale it to multiple patches and take the hassle out of the patch management process. With automated patch management, you don’t even have to organize a firefill before installing patches.
Thanks to predictive patch scheduling, you can set an optimal maintenance window for every remote worker based on their usage patterns and behavior. Not only that, it can also allow you to select the best time for performing patch management. This can save your cybersecurity team from one of the biggest headaches regarding patch management.
Conclusion
Automated patch management can deliver tons of benefits, especially for remote workers. Since they are the soft target for attackers and IT teams lack visibility, you can drastically minimize the security risk to remote workers with the help of automated patch management.
AI-powered patch management can solve two of the biggest problems regarding patch management, time and patch priority. This can give your security teams a clear direction on which patches to install and when. It can save a lot of time your security teams spend on deciding which patches to install and when.
The time your cybersecurity team can free up by using automated patch management can be put to good use in preparing documentation, analyzing data, and preparing reports. All this can help you ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.
What is the biggest benefit of automated patch management in your opinion? Share it with us in the comments section below.