Server patching

Effortless and automated server patching

With automated updates, customization, and centralized visibility, the capability of patch management within TeamViewer Asset Management ensures hassle-free operating software and server patching while covering all your broader asset management needs.

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TeamViewer Remote

What is server patching?

Server patching refers to a process for applying software updates to servers. It helps safeguard your business against cyber threats and keeps your technical infrastructure up and running.

Why prioritize server patching?

The best patch management software should equip you to update your technical assets, from specialist frontline machinery to work apps on employee devices. However, servers demand special care. After all, these are where your most sensitive data and workloads reside and where core applications are run, so failsafe, easy-to-control server patch management needs to be a top priority.

Bringing you automated patching, streamlined management of updates, and easy roll-out, TeamViewer Remote Management delivers reliable, hassle-free server patching, suitable for even the most complex, sprawling IT environments. But server patch management is just the start. Coupled with TeamViewer’s remote monitoring, remote control, and remote access capabilities, all your wider asset management needs are covered in one place.

How does server patching work?

Some patching tasks arise at predictable intervals—Microsoft’s ‘Patch Tuesday,’ for instance. But most often, they arrive without warning, as and when vendors become aware of specific vulnerabilities, bugs, and other issues. 

More devices, more data, scattered users, and a wide variety of workloads can mean a significant stack of server components to oversee, including patches for operating systems, component drivers and firmware, databases, hypervisors, and more. It’s a lot for any sysadmin to manage, but a systematic approach to server patching helps you stay on top of it. 

Effective server patch management involves tracking patch notifications from software vendors. You should be able to cross-reference these alerts with your asset inventory to determine which—if any—of your server components are impacted. Before deployment and rollout, you must also check the patches for potential compatibility issues.

What is the patching process?

A typical process for server patch management is as follows:

  • Patch notification

    The process is usually instigated by a software vendor's patch announcement. Patch alerts should be integrated into your IT service management (ITSM) system to help you keep track of such announcements.

  • Establishing applicability

    Referring to your IT asset inventory, you need to establish what servers, operating systems, and applications the patch applies to.

  • Patch testing

    How will this impact critical operations if the patch is rolled out to every server component? What will be the likely consequences for interdependent software and devices? Depending on the nature of the patch, you should consider deploying patches on isolated non-critical servers in the first instance.

  • Deployment planning

    Determine when and in what order you will deploy the patch. Deal with critical systems first to minimize high-risk vulnerabilities.

  • Patch roll-out and monitoring

    It is important to track and check that the update has been successfully deployed across all target servers rather than just installing and launching it.

  • Server patch logging

    Post-implementation, you should record the patch details on the asset inventory listing for each affected server.

What is automated patch management?

Multiple things can go wrong with server patching, especially if you work from basic checklists and handle everything manually. For instance, incomplete asset inventory information could mean that particular server components are missed out completely. And it’s too easy to make a mistake with patch configuration or overlook a software interdependency.

Resource constraints can also be a major challenge. Manual patching takes time, even more so if you have to physically attend different server locations to apply the updates. And with multiple other important tasks on your team’s to-do list, it can sometimes be days, weeks, or even months until critical vulnerabilities are addressed.

Why automate patching?

Automated patch management deserves to be a top priority. With TeamViewer Asset Management, you no longer need to manually search for assets and apply patches server-by-server. From a single platform, you can see precisely what assets need to be patched and schedule deployments automatically based on the schedules and rules you set.

With automated server patch management delivered through TeamViewer, there’s a huge opportunity to significantly reduce the manual workload associated with server patching, reduce the chance of error, and ensure security vulnerabilities are fixed at the right time.

Best practices for server patching

  • Prioritize based on risk

    Not all patches carry the same risk, so many vendors use the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) to rank their patch alerts. You should use what you know about the severity of the vulnerability to decide how quickly—and in what order to deploy your patches. 

    As an obvious example, high-severity vulnerabilities affecting servers hosting critical data will likely need patching immediately. Further down the severity chain—a minor code addition or bug fix, for instance—it may make sense to wait for your next planned maintenance window to keep operational disruption to a minimum.

  • Aim for visibility

    If you cannot see a server, you cannot patch it. Before updating your patching procedures, look carefully at your IT inventory management capabilities. Do you know what servers, server components, and applications are in play within your organization? An accurate server inventory can help avoid unpatched systems and security gaps.

  • Cover all locations

    It is becoming much less common for an organization’s entire server stack to be conveniently located in one server room. Cloud adoption, the growth of IoT, moves towards edge computing in manufacturing and industrial settings, and the rise of hybrid and remote working are some reasons server components can be scattered across multiple locations. 

    Your server patch management software should allow you to successfully deploy all updates for all servers, associated devices, applications, and users, no matter where they are based—all from a single dashboard.

Better together

Enhance your TeamViewer Remote subscription with our powerful add-ons for monitoring, managing, and protecting your entire IT ecosystem.

Server patching: Beyond basic updates

How should IT decision-makers treat server patching? On one level, it’s easy to see it as a ‘dull but necessary’ element of your team’s to-do list. But from a strategic perspective, this is not a tick-box task; as a key element of your wider IT asset management approach, it plays a major role in boosting the security, performance, and lifetime value of your technical infrastructure.

Achieving lean

As we’ve seen, server patch management requires you to build and maintain an up-to-date inventory of your assets as a foundational step—if you can’t see it, you can’t patch it!

This provides a valuable opportunity to consider your environment in the round: “What do we own? Who uses it? And do we still need it?” There may be plenty of scope here for streamlining your infrastructure for a leaner, more efficient, and cost-effective environment.

Boosting performance

An overlooked minor bug fix for a single piece of niche firmware might not seem like much. But over time, if multiple unactioned updates are applied to tens, hundreds, or thousands of components, the cumulative impact of laggy performance, outages, compatibility issues, and other problems can easily mount up.

In this context, patching plays a crucial role in ensuring optimal asset performance is maintained, and the usable life of those assets is extended.

Ensuring security

Gartner found that the overwhelming majority of exploits were not zero-day attacks but were vulnerabilities known by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident. In other words, they could and should have been dealt with sooner.

On the security front, updating your server patching capabilities offers you an ‘easy win’: a chance to shut the door on vulnerabilities before threat actors can exploit them. There’s an important reputational and trust-building element to consider here, too. Customers, clients, and supply-chain partners won’t expect you to block every single breach—but they will expect you to have robust risk mitigation measures in place. If you can point to an auditable, systematic, fast, and effective approach to patching, it can go a long way to establishing that trust.

TeamViewer Asset Management & Server patching

TeamViewer Asset Management equips you to tackle the server patching challenge in a way that’s fully integrated with your wider IT remote management processes.

Discover and track each server component automatically. See at a glance what needs to be updated and when. Deploy your patches automatically according to the rules you set. Step in to provide instant patch-related support to any device or user in any location. 

Patching is never a standalone process, and TeamViewer users worldwide appreciate this. For a joint approach to managing and securing your servers and all other IT assets, everything you need is here.

Centralized server inventory management

Automatically scan and discover every server component and device across your network. Automatically detect vulnerabilities caused by outdated software. See what must be done on the patching front at all times.

Automated patch deployment

Automatically deploy Windows and macOS patches for hundreds of third-party applications from a single location. See what patches are live, and check the status for all components from a single intuitive dashboard.

Patching and so much more

Patching is just the start with TeamViewer. Use the solution’s full remote connectivity capabilities to provide instant support to users and quickly resolve patch-related queries and all other issues. Use remote access and control to access any server, to check and reconfigure where needed.

Nagradzane oprogramowanie zarówno dla osób prywatnych, jak i firm

Server patching for industries

Server patching for healthcare

Trusted in some of the world’s most heavily regulated sectors—including healthcare—TeamViewer equips IT teams to address vulnerabilities as quickly as possible after updates are released. This helps ensure sensitive clinical data is secured in adherence with healthcare-specific and wider data protection regulations. The ability to schedule automated remote server patching outside clinic opening times ensures critical systems remain operational when needed.

Server patching for banking and finance

TeamViewer’s platform enables centralized management and deployment of patch policies across all your servers. This helps you apply a consistent approach across geographically dispersed systems, which is essential for multi-branch finance and banking environments. You can customize and apply your own patching policies and schedules, reducing the need for any disruption in transaction processing.

 

Server patching for retail

TeamViewer allows you to define and deploy patching policies specific to your business. This ensures that patching procedures are tailored to the realities of even the most complex, multi-branch retail environments. Examples include prioritizing security patches for servers that support critical systems, such as point-of-sale terminals while scheduling less urgent updates outside of trading hours.

Why choose TeamViewer as your server patching provider?

TeamViewer’s Wake-On-LAN capabilities allow you to wake any sleeping server to apply OS, firmware, and other updates outside of business hours.

  

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Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Server patching—and patch management more generally—is often categorized in three ways, corresponding with the three main categories of patches. These are security patches, used to fix security holes in an application; bug fixes, which address what are usually minor system flaws; and feature updates, which aim to improve existing features or sometimes introduce new ones.

The patch management cycle refers to the entire systematic patch implementation process. It involves evaluating new patch releases by vendors, identifying the servers and other assets the patch applies to, testing the patch, planning patch roll-out to minimize disruption, implementing the patch, and verifying that it has been applied successfully.

No piece of software is perfect. Especially regarding operating systems, firmware, and other server-related applications, bugs, vulnerabilities, and the need for additional optimizations tend to arise frequently. Patching is necessary to fix these issues.

A patch is a form of update. Generally, though, when a software vendor refers to a ‘patch,’ they mean a small and specific change to software—perhaps a few lines of code—designed to fix a particular problem, such as a bug or vulnerability. An ‘update’ usually refers to a bigger change, perhaps to add an entirely new feature to an application or to make multiple changes to improve performance.

The length of time required for server patching depends on multiple factors, such as the nature and significance of the patch and the number of server components involved. For instance, a single, straightforward patch may only take 15 minutes. But if the same patch needs to be applied manually to an entire business server stack scattered across multiple locations, the entire project can take days—or sometimes even weeks.

Thanks to TeamViewer’s automated asset discovery, scheduling, rollout, and monitoring capabilities, you can significantly reduce the time required for successful, error-free patching task completion.

Technically, patching is a form of updating. However, when it’s described as a ‘patch,’ an update often seeks to address a security vulnerability. This means that patch announcements often arrive without warning. Best practice requires you to approach security patching significantly more urgently than routine updates.