Patching in Website Security
Patching are the updates, fixes, changes and improvements required to software security, computer programs, database management systems and any of the digital facilities a company relies upon to operate. This includes securing vulnerabilities, eradicating bugs, and installing updates and in turn producing a higher level of security, improving functionality, performance and usability for operators.
Why do we need to patch?
As digital facilities are always being improved, programs and software can become out of date. As such hackers become more skilled and are able to work their way into older programs and software, which is why new ones are released.
It’s important that programs and software are kept up to date and vulnerabilities are assessment, monitored and patched where necessary.
Websites are particularly prone to vulnerabilities and patches are common. Bespoke code, plugins, outdated software, and template and theme vulnerabilities are all reasons why websites are hacked. It’s important to secure websites with patching and most importantly that it is continually managed.
What are the difficulties with patching?
However, it might sound easy but patching can be very technical. Some problems are as follow
- Equipment or software is so old that updates are no longer available or supported by providers. It’s important to identify these and change where necessary.
- Patching one thing can lead to another issue elsewhere. Where you have digital assets all connected it’s important to understand how they all work together and provide security for the whole network.
- Maintain inventory lists of patching updates is important to know what has happened and how future patches may impact the digital assets in line with what’s been done previously.
- Ultimately patching takes time and money. However, for small businesses it’s important to streamline cost which is why when you host your website, email and email spam filtering with us we can adopt our SME service.
Patching Management
We recommend that all companies, both big and small, have a patching management strategy.
For SMEs, the risk to the business of not patching could be catastrophic but equally the cost of patching on a regular basic can be cost prohibitive.
Either SMEs need to do this in house or outsource to us and we can streamline the patching process as part of our low-cost service to SMEs.
