Patch management
Patch management is a process of acquiring, testing, and deploying patches across systems. These patches can be operating system level or can even be application level.
Let's look at an example of a use case of an organization.
Company XYZ is a mid-sized e-commerce organization and has around 500 servers. As a quarterly patch management cycle, for the vulnerabilities discovered, patches have to be applied:
Solution 1
In this way, the system administrator manually logs into the server and runs the yum
update security command to update all the security-related system packages. This is the most manual way and takes a lot of time.
Solution 2
In this approach, we use some kind of automation tool such as Ansible to update all the security-related packages of the system.
Solution 3
In this approach, we have a centralized patch management system to which all servers are connected. At a click of a button, with the packages selected, all the packages will be pushed. It takes just two minutes...