What Is Patch Management?
Patch management is a proactive approach to mitigate already-identified security gaps in software. Most of the time, these patches are provided by third-party vendors to proactively close the security gaps and secure the platform, for example.
RedHat provides security advisories and patches for various RedHat products such as RHEL, OpenShift, OpenStack, etc. Microsoft provides patches in the form of updates for Windows OS. These patches include updates to third-party libraries, modules, packages, or utilities. Patches are prioritized and, in most organizations, patching of systems is done at a specific cadence and handled through a change control process. These patches are deployed through lower environments first to understand the impact and then applied in higher environments, such as production.