Teams are showcasing their brand-new vulnerability scanner with pride, but they have no real procedure in place to address the issues it finds. The two terms are so frequently used interchangeably that people are actually unaware that they are referring to essentially different activities with distinct owners, objectives, and results.
Knowing the difference has a direct impact on security outcomes, so it's not semantic pedantry. While companies that only concentrate on maintaining system updates overlook vulnerabilities that patches are unable to address, those that approach vulnerability management as "patching with extra steps" miss the bigger picture of attack surface reduction. Both are necessary for modern security teams, and instead of assuming one takes precedence over the other, they must comprehend how they complement one another.
What Is Patch Management?
The process of patch management involves obtaining, assessing, and deploying software updates to ensure systems remain current. The purpose of patch management is to apply vendor updates that address vulnerabilities related to security, features, and performance, including security patches, bug fixes, and feature enhancements.
Traditionally, IT operations teams have been responsible for keeping systems up and running. Common patch management processes include reviewing vendor security bulletins, testing patches in non-production environments, rolling updates into production during maintenance windows, deploying updates across systems, and verifying successful installation.
While different tools are used to distribute updates, the patch management process is largely defined by the operational effort required to apply approved patches without introducing new issues. A common metric for evaluating patch management is the time and cost required to obtain, test, and deploy patches across systems.
What Is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is an ongoing process of identifying and assessing vulnerabilities in the systems, networks, and applications that fall under a security team's jurisdiction. Patching is only one aspect of the overall issue; other examples may include cloud misconfigurations, weak passwords, excessive permissions associated with IAM roles, poor architectural design decisions, and policy violations that have accumulated over time due to the lack of oversight. The main goal is to identify potential threats and reduce their likelihood of being exploited, rather than simply checking off items from a list of updates.
Vulnerability scanners, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools as well as IaC security tools are used in continuous vulnerability monitoring. After vulnerabilities are found, they need to be ranked according to the threat intelligence that is currently available, the asset(s)'s importance to your company, the likelihood that they will be exploited, and the pertinent context in which they are found. It is crucial to remember that different vulnerabilities will need different remediation techniques, so they should be handled as distinct entities. All of the aforementioned strategies can be used to address weaknesses, as can embracing the risks involved if minimizing them proves to be more beneficial.
Security teams own vulnerability management, and their mindset is based on the concept of an attack surface and what constitutes an acceptable risk versus the standard update schedule in relation to changes to a system.
Patch Management vs Vulnerability Management: Comparison Table
Difference between Patch Management and Vulnerability Management
- Scope and Focus
- Patch management is limited to using vendor-released software updates to address known problems. With the implicit presumption that current equates to secure, the question is "are our systems running the latest approved versions?" It follows the release schedule of the vendors and reacts to what they publish.
- Regardless of whether a vendor patch is available, vulnerability management's overarching goal is to find and fix all security flaws. "What can attackers exploit in our environment and how do we reduce that risk" is the question, which may entail patching but frequently calls for configuration adjustments, architectural enhancements, or compensating controls. It prioritizes vulnerabilities based on actual exploitability rather than vendor severity scores and is proactive in finding vulnerabilities before they are widely known.
- Coverage
- Patch management has historically covered operating systems and programs for which vendors provide updates, such as Windows servers, Linux distributions, commercial software, and possibly network device firmware. "Things that receive patches from upstream providers" is the boundary, which is reasonably well-defined and controllable using established procedures and tools.
- Everything on your attack surface is covered by vulnerability management, including network configurations, access controls, encryption settings, cloud services, IaC templates, custom applications, third-party integrations, and infrastructure components. Although patching won't fix a publicly accessible S3 bucket, it is unquestionably a vulnerability that needs to be managed. Although none of these have patches, Kubernetes RBAC errors, excessively permissive IAM roles, and disabled logging are frequently more exploitable than a lack of security updates.
- Timing and Frequency
- Patch management is usually organized on a monthly or quarterly schedule according to vendor changes. These cycles often occur on "patch Tuesday" (for Windows) and with "emergency" patches (for zero-day vulnerabilities). New patches are often tested and deployed in multiple phases (development, staging, and production) over many days or weeks. The cadence is predetermined and predictable.
- Unlike patch management, vulnerability management is always done continuously by scanning, detecting, and monitoring systems for vulnerabilities. As infrastructure changes, applications are deployed during the development process, configurations drift, and as new threat intelligence is revealed the number of new vulnerabilities increases. The cadence of vulnerability management matches the speed of change within your organization; therefore new vulnerabilities are discovered every day (or even more frequently) rather than monthly.
- Ownership
- A patch management team is generally part of an organization’s IT operations or infrastructure group that is responsible for keeping systems accessible and functioning. Patching is about testing new patches to determine the level of impact they may have on the stability of an organization’s production environment.
- Vulnerability management typically exists within a company’s security teams that focus on reducing an organization’s exposure to loss or harm from potential threat actors. The priority is reducing the overall attack surface area through timely remediation of vulnerabilities, even when this requires coordination with operations teams or accepting a degree of instability. A successful outcome for security teams is the reduction of exploitable vulnerabilities through software fixes, configuration changes, or architectural improvements.
- Outcome
- Patch management results in systems that are secure due to using the most recent, vendor supported versions of their associated software and also have known security fixes (patches/revisions). You can measure the success of patch management by developing and adhering to compliance metrics such as "98% of servers have been patched within the previous 30 days" or by reviewing records of patch deployments, etc.
- Vulnerability management reduces both the attack surface size and the overall risk to an organization from the existence of security vulnerabilities within its systems. You can measure success through vulnerability counts, decrease in mean time to remediate, fixing critical, high-priority findings; and, ultimately, having fewer successful security breaches. The end goal here is not to have all patches in compliance; it's to make your environment less attractive to potential exploits.
Why Vulnerability Management Is More Critical in Cloud and DevOps
Vulnerability management is now far more important than traditional patch management due to the fundamental changes in the security landscape brought about by cloud and DevOps environments:
- Ephemeral infrastructure: By the time a patch cycle ends, the infrastructure has already been repeatedly destroyed and recreated because containers and serverless functions only last for minutes or hours rather than months.
- Infrastructure-as-Code misconfigurations: Conventional patch management tools are unable to identify or address configuration vulnerabilities such as overly permissive security groups, unencrypted storage, disabled logging, and public access to sensitive resources.
- Faster release cycles: Monthly patch cycles are incompatible with DevOps velocity because code ships multiple times per day, introducing vulnerabilities continuously.
- Shift-left security requirements – Automated vulnerability scanning and fixing during development before they reach production requires vulnerability management integrated into CI/CD pipelines rather than patch management running on deployed systems
- Template and image security – Vulnerability management secures the images and IaC templates that generate ephemeral resources rather than chasing individual instances, preventing vulnerable configurations from being deployed at all.
Conclusion
Although patch management and vulnerability management are both components of a security program, they serve different purposes and can be considered as working together. Patch management's function is to ensure that any system is kept correctly patched with the most recent vendor patches, while vulnerability management aims to lower actual risk across all systems by identifying vulnerabilities whether there are patches available or not.
When organizations view patch management and vulnerability management as the same function, they run the risk of leaving a vulnerability within their systems. For example, they may conduct vulnerability scans but do not implement systematic remediation processes; or, they may focus on resolving only patching while failing to identify configuration vulnerabilities.
The most effective solution is to implement both strategies simultaneously: the vulnerability management process provides ongoing assessment, prioritization and multiple avenues of remediation for the types of attack surfaces that exist today; while the patch management function receives systematic updates from vendors to be used in the vulnerability assessment process. Automating and implementing continuity of monitoring through the combined application of both patch management and vulnerability management will allow organizations to significantly decrease the size of their attack surface.
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