Was ist Patch-Management?

• Patch management is a critical function for securing your organization’s attack surface against known exploits.
• The patch management process consists of five main steps: discovery, prioritization, testing, deployment, and verification.
• Traditional patching methods are often slow and manual, leading to a "patching bottleneck" between security and IT teams.
• A modern, risk-based patch management approach helps you prioritize the actual risks to your organization, not just high CVSS scores, to shorten your mean time to remediate (MTTR).

Request a demo to see how you can close the loop on vulnerability exposure and shorten your MTTR.

Was ist Patch-Management?At its core, patch management is the formal process your organization uses to identify, acquire, test, and deploy software updates, or "patches," to your IT assets.

Vendors release patches for several reasons: 

• Fix software bugs
• Improve performance
• Add new features
• Fix vulnerabilities that attackers could otherwise exploit

A patch can be a minor, single fix (a "hotfix") or a larger collection of updates. 

The goal of a patch management program is to create a consistent and repeatable process for applying these patches. It's a core component of IT operations and a successful vulnerability remediation program to keep your environment stable and secure.

Effective patch management is not just an IT chore. It is one of the most critical functions for protecting your organization. A failure to patch creates immediate and significant risk.

• Security risk where attackers actively exploit known vulnerabilities. In fact, many of the most damaging cyber attacks, like WannaCry, were successful because organizations failed to apply an available patch. Authoritative lists like the CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog show that threat actors build their playbooks around a specific set of unpatched, exploitable flaws.
• Compliance risk where failing to patch can result in non-compliance with major regulations. Standards like PCI-DSS (for credit card data) and HIPAA (for healthcare information) explicitly require you to maintain secure systems, and that includes the timely application of security patches.
• Operational and financial risk. Patches fix bugs that can cause system instability and downtime. A single unpatched flaw can lead to a system crash and disrupt your business operations. When that flaw leads to a data breach, the financial consequences are severe. According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average cost of a data breach has hit $4.4 million.

A mature patch management program is a continuous cycle, often called the patch management lifecycle. While the specific tools may vary, the core patch management process follows five key steps to ensure your team applies patches in a safe, efficient, and auditable way.

1. Erfassung

You cannot patch what you do not know you have. 

The first step is to maintain a complete and accurate inventory of all assets on your network. It includes laptops, servers, and virtual machines, along with all the operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) and third-party applications running on them. This discovery process scans your environment to identify which assets are missing which patches.

2. Priorisierung

Once you have a list of missing patches, you must decide what to fix first. 

A traditional approach is to prioritize patches based on their Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score and fix "critical" or "high" vulnerabilities first. 

However, this can overwhelm your remediation teams. A more effective approach would be to assess the actual risk to your organization by asking key questions: Is a threat actor actively exploiting this vulnerability in the wild? Is the affected asset critical to our business?

3. Testing

Be cautious about deploying a patch directly to your production environment. 

A new patch can sometimes conflict with existing applications or custom configurations and cause a critical system to fail. 

Once you’ve scoped which vulnerabilities you want to deploy, you should first research to see if a patch is available. Unfortunately, if you’re doing this manually and not using software tools that do this automatically, your team could burn up valuable work hours trying to find the right patch.

After you discover the correct patch, consider first deploying it to a controlled, non-production test environment that mirrors your live systems. This step allows you to verify the patch is stable and will not disrupt business operations. 

To build further confidence, Tenable's patch partner, Adaptiva, researches and tests all patches for reliability before publication to decrease the risk of a patch causing downtime. Any patch that does not pass testing automatically goes to a Block List. This step allows you to verify the patch is stable and will not disrupt business operations.

4. Deployment

After you’ve successfully tested and approved a patch, you can schedule it for deployment to your production environment. 

You can do deployment in phases, starting with a small, low-risk group of assets and then gradually rolling it out to your entire organization. This phased approach minimizes potential impact and allows you to pause the deployment with any new issue discovery.

5. Verification and Reporting

Closing the loop is your final step.

Here, verify patch deployment worked across all targeted assets. For example, run new scans to confirm patch installation and that the vulnerability is no longer present. You must also keep detailed reports to prove compliance with internal SLAs and external regulations.

For more guidance on this, refer to government frameworks like the NIST Special Publication 800-40.

If the patch management process is so well-defined, why do so many organizations struggle with it? 

The answer is the "patching bottleneck."

For most organizations, patching is a slow, manual, and reactive process.

According to a 2023 report from Adaptiva and the Ponemon Institute, 62% of organizations report having low confidence in their ability to comply with patch service level agreements (SLAs). 

And, according to Adaptiva's 2025 State of Patch Management Report, this is because 77% of organizations need more than a week to deploy patches, leaving a wide window of opportunity for attackers.

An organizational silo between security and IT teams often causes this delay.

1. Your security team performs a vulnerability assessment and finds thousands of "critical" vulnerabilities.
2. They export this massive list, often in a spreadsheet, and pass it to the IT team to fix.
3. The long list of vulnerabilities inundates your IT team. They have no way to know which of the 5,000 "critical" flaws to fix first. They must spend hours manually correlating vulnerabilities to the correct patches, all while trying not to break business-critical systems. Or they’re patching and simply hoping it fixes the CVEs their security team has sent over.

Everything mentioned here is what’s called the patching bottleneck. It creates an adversarial relationship between teams, misses high-priority threats, and dramatically lengthens your mean time to remediate (MTTR).

You can break the patching bottleneck by changing your approach from volume-based patching to risk-based patch management.

Risk-based patch management accepts that not all vulnerabilities are equal. Instead of trying to patch every "critical" flaw based on a static CVSS score, you focus your limited resources on the vulnerabilities that pose the actual, exploitable risk to your unique business.

A true risk-based approach adds critical layers of context, such as:

• Real-time threat intelligence
  • Is a threat actor actively exploiting a vulnerability in the wild right now?
• Predictive analysis
  • How likely is it that an attacker may exploit this vulnerability in the near future?
• Asset criticality
  • Is this vulnerability on a non-critical test server or on your most important, customer-facing database?

Here is where Tenable's advanced prioritization provides a clear path forward. 

By using metrics like the Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR), which identifies the actual risk of a vulnerability, and the Asset Criticality Rating (ACR), which identifies your most critical assets, you can stop the guesswork. 

A data-driven approach breaks the patching bottleneck. It enables smart automation that automatically correlates vulnerabilities to the best available superseding patch, which is the single patch that includes all previous fixes, and gives your IT team a much smaller, truly actionable list to apply.

Take a self-guided tour below to explore Tenable Patch Management's autonomous, risk-based workflows.

Vulnerability patching should not be a separate, broken process that happens in a different tool, days or weeks after someone or some system finds a vulnerability. 

To truly shorten your remediation times and close the loop on risk, you must unify your patching and vulnerability management programs.

This unified approach is the core of a modern exposure management strategy. Tenable Patch Management is integrated directly with Tenable Vulnerability Management on the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, which allows your teams to work from a single platform to discover a vulnerability, prioritize the risk, and deploy the correct patch, all in one seamless workflow.

Learn about Tenable Patch Management to see the full product features for closing your vulnerability exposure gap.

There are a lot of questions surrounding patch management, in terms of policies, differences, and why it's so difficult for some organizations. Take a look and find the answers to those common questions here: 

What is the difference between patch management and vulnerability management?

Vulnerability management is the broad, continuous process of identifying, prioritizing, and reporting on vulnerabilities across your organization. Patch management is the specific action of remediating those vulnerabilities by deploying a patch. Effective patch management is an important piece of a vulnerability management program, but it is not the whole thing.

What is a patch management policy? 

A patch management policy is a formal document that outlines your organization's rules and procedures for patching. It defines roles and responsibilities, sets timelines (SLAs) for deploying patches based on their severity, and details the required steps for testing, deployment, and verification.

Why is patching so difficult for most organizations? 

Patching is complex due to several factors: the sheer volume of new vulnerabilities, the organizational patching bottleneck between security and IT teams, and the fear of a patch breaking a critical system. Traditional, manual processes and a reliance on CVSS scores alone, which overwhelm patch remediation teams, are the biggest challenges.

What is automated patch management? 

Automated patch management uses a software solution to automatically handle the entire patch management lifecycle, from discovering missing patches to testing and deploying them based on a set policy. This approach eliminates slow, manual work, reduces human error, and can help shorten mean time to remediate (MTTR).

Move from reactive patching to proactive remediation

Your organization cannot afford to get stuck in a reactive, manual patching cycle. The patching bottleneck is a critical exposure gap that attackers exploit every day.

By adopting a unified, risk-based patch management approach, you can move beyond simply reacting. You can empower your teams to proactively close vulnerabilities based on actual risk, meet your remediation SLAs, and build a more resilient security program.

Request a custom demo to talk to an expert about how to integrate automated patching into your Tenable Vulnerability Management solution.