PATCH MANAGEMENT — Backbone of Security & Compliance Strategy
You must have heard about the zero-day vulnerability that took all news headlines. That is where organizations distribute patch updates to fix applications from vulnerabilities. For software developers, providing security updates become a tedious task that comes as a part of the agile development methodology. Patch management plays a significant role in safeguarding organizations’ critical assets. This article is a quick guide on patch management, its importance, best practices, and AWS native tools available for patch management.
What is Patch Management?
Patch management is a process in which the development and the security team fixes a bug or vulnerability to prevent the system from security breaches or attacks. Patches are like a band-aid for any application that helps rectify the issue. Every security update you have accepted is patches that developers tried continuously to fix their product.
In other words, patch management is a system where the software development team provides a small program (in the form of an update) to fix the bug; that was there in the earlier release of the software. According to some reports, by 2025, the projection of global Patch Management Market revenue will reach 950 million USD approximately.
How has patch management become an integral part of every organization’s security policy?
Every organization should cater to a patch management policy after a successful software development & deployment process. It will help the organization roll out or release the patches without damaging the customers or other business flow. Here is a list of some prominent reasons for having a patch management program.
· Security:
The first and foremost reason for having a patch management program is to prevent systems from security vulnerability through fixes. Most applications are susceptible to cyber-attacks. Attackers try to breach systems through vulnerabilities and bugs. Patch management helps organizations reduce their security risks by providing the fix on time.
· Compliance:
As cyber-attacks rise exponentially, organizations require regulatory bodies to preserve a particular grade of adherence and compliance. That is where patch management acts as an influential tool for observing and maintaining standard compliance.
· Maintains system uptime:
Providing regular patch management ensures that the product or the application is running smoothly and is up-to-date with the compliance, security guidelines, etc. An up-to-date system will run smoothly without any downtime.
· Improvement in the feature:
Patch management does not revolve around bug fixes only. It can also provide functionality updates apart from vulnerability fixes. Patches can be crucial to confirm that the system is in its best and most prominent form.
Best practices for smooth patch management
Although patch management is challenging, a few best practices can help render the best patch management, protecting your system.
· Automate open-source patching: Open-source elements in software development help developers easily integrate to build products. But open-source components are prone to lethal vulnerabilities. With the increase in the use of open-source components, the number of vulnerabilities in dependencies and libraries also went high. Automation is the best way to maintain a stable inventory of all open-source libraries & dependencies with vulnerable versions. Automated tools and support from the Montycloud solution can automatically generate a pull request highlighting the updated versions, as it detects an unsafe version.
· Stay up-to-date with security updates: Every vendor company has a team of security researchers who regularly evaluate their software, try looking for bugs, and resolve discovered vulnerabilities through patch updates. Every organization gets intimated as the security update gets released through emails or product notifications from the vendors. So, it is the best practice to stay up-to-date with vendor notifications and updates.
· Eliminating manual patch distribution & validation: Patching is an essential process as the organization’s reputation depends on various products. A single security breach or vulnerability can cause millions if not billions. Therefore, timely action on patching the software is essential. Manually fixing issues and distributing patches will require too much manual work and a waste of productive time. So, cloud-based automated patch management can remove manual validation of applications during patch management.
What is AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager?
Manually revamping the product with patches is a harrowing approach. But with the help of AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, the patch management process in Windows or Linux EC2 instances becomes automatic. Companies can feed patches to a large group of EC2 instances with the help of Amazon EC2 tags.
Workflow for AWS Systems Manager Patch Management
AWS Systems Manager does the following five steps for ensuring centralized multi-account patching:
i. Creating resource group: Through resource groups, simultaneous management & automation of large numbers of resources becomes easy. You can create these resource groups based on a server function. For creating resource groups:
· Open AWS Systems Manager console > Find Resources
· Provide details like:
· Resource Group Name: GKR-Linux-SSM
· ResourceGroup Tag Key: ssm-linuxpatching
· ResourceGroup Tag Value: True
· Also, select group type as Tag-based & resource type as AWS::EC2::Instance
· Provide a tag name and press the Preview group resources button.
ii. Set up the required IAM roles: For this, you have to log in to the Master Account and create the following IAM Roles. Set the role: SSM-Automationexecution-role. Also edit the “Trust Relationships” and provide the policies required for this IAM role.
iii. Congifuring the Patch baseline: The patch baselines determine which patches get authorized for installation on the AWS instances depending on approval rules. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager delivers predefined patch baselines specific for each operating system.
· To configure this, go to System Manager > Patch Manager (from the menu).
· Then Create Patch Baseline.
· Then, provide Patch Baseline Name as “ssm-patchbaseline4linux” with a description as “Patch Baseline for Linux Systems.” Select OS and other necessary details. Finally, hit the “Create patch baseline” button to execute the changes.
iv. Create an automation document for executing patch baseline operations.
v. Execute automation to patch resources on all target accounts.
MontyCloud is a cloud powerhouse enabling various IT operations of an organization with ease. MontyCloud can offer a single pane of glass view of all EC2 instances. It has a powerful feature that helps manage the entire fleet with just one compliance policy. Companies these days have multiple AWS accounts. Patches vary based on the OS and account services. A single delay in the patching can cause a massive issue to the organization’s security. For managing and deploying the overall patching process rapidly, MontyCloud has one compliance policy to handle them all.
So, through MontyCloud’s single compliance policy, an administrator can easily manage and roll out multiple AWS account patching processes without individually logging into each one of the accounts. They provide a single dashboard from where you can manage all of them just by following one compliance. So, if you are looking for such benefits and AWS patch management solutions, MontyCloud is the best place. Other businesses can also seek the help of their expertise on how to perform patch management in bulk on AWS systems.
