Patch Management Strategies Patch Management Research Paper

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The third significant risk is that of the patch not fully addressing the dependences of the operating system and browser variations in the total user base. Related to the second point, this is a major challenge at colleges and universities with wireless and WiFi networks where hundreds of types of laptops and mobile devices are used (Higby, Bailey, 2004). The sheer variety of laptops, PCs and mobile devices make patch management in larger colleges and universities a continual and costly challenge.

Cost Effective Measures for Patch Management

Spanning the spectrum from the manual to the fully automated, there are cost effective measures that organizations can take to attain a high level of effectiveness with patch management. Beginning with the most manually based approach of defining blacklists of systems that have been compromised on a network through server-based analysis (Higby, Bailey, 2004) to the use of semi-automated and automated patch management (Gerace, Cavusoglu, 2009) there is a range of cost-effect measures for managing patch distribution and validation. Blacklisting specific systems has proven to be resource intensive in academic institutions that have a very wide variety of laptops, WiFi-enabled devices, often with mixed results (Gerace, Mouton, 2004).

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Studies indicate that automated patch management using applications including BigFix Enterprise Suite, HFNetChk, and PatchLink Update are effective in ensuring compliance of up to 31% of all systems in a network (Brandman, 2005). Microsoft's Automatic Update (Gerace, Mouton, 2004) is a third alternative in networks that are entirely based on this vendor's operating systems and has performance comparable to the third-party automated patch management suites.

Conclusion

In network environments where there is a wide variation in Wifi-enabled devices the best possible alternative are third-party automated patch management systems including HFNetChk and PatchLink Update (Brandman, 2005). Blacklisting through server-based authentication (Higby, Bailey, 2004) is not scalable over time and does not have a prescriptive approach to solving the problems of security; the approaches are only restrictive. The most cost-effective strategies for patch management combine change management programs and initiatives in conjunction with automated patch management that can scale across a wide variety of operating systems and platforms......

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https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/patch-management-strategies-patch-management-1861