
As a result, an employee’s responsibility to update software and remediate vulnerabilities is reduced. These tools track software and middleware updates and then automatically alert users or execute the updates.

IT managers and security specialists use patch management tools to ensure the components of their company’s software stack and IT infrastructure are up to date. To put it simply, patch management is the process of installing these patches on your computing devices. Nowadays, patches come in digital form and are released by software vendors to fix or improve an existing program by addressing vulnerabilities, bugs, and other issues in their products. The origin of the term “software patching” can be traced back to the early computing days in the 1940s when programmers punched computer code into a paper tape, and patches were literally pieces of tape that were stuck over the holes to correct the code. A software patch is a small piece of software that fixes or improves an existing program.
