How I learned to stop worrying and love the patch
Twenty‑plus years in the trenches have taught me two immutable truths: 1) coffee is a security control, and 2) patches never arrive fast enough.
Industry research says attackers now turn fresh CVEs into working exploits in about five days—an uncomfortable fact I discovered at 02:17 one Tuesday while muttering “why now?” at my SIEM dashboard. Meanwhile, most enterprises still need weeks or months to close the same holes. The void between “exploit released” and “patch deployed” is what I call the patch gap. At many organisations it swallows roughly 80 % of their real‑world exposure.
Why the gap stays stubbornly wide
- CVE tsunami – Tens of thousands of new entries arrive every year; only a fraction matter, but triaging them by hand feels like sorting lentils from couscous.
- Swivel‑chair workflows – Scanner → ticketing → endpoint tool → hope. Each hop adds latency.
- Third‑party sprawl – Browsers, VPN clients, random CAD utilities: none patch through the nice, comfy OS pipeline.
- Uptime politics – Try persuading operations to reboot the payment gateway the day before quarter‑end. Bring popcorn.
- Talent gap – Hiring experienced patch engineers is harder than convincing my teenagers to update their phones.
Put together, these hurdles create a backlog big enough to hide a camel—and attackers know it.
The day I called in the robots
A few years back I adopted Vicarius vRx as my patch‑management sidekick. I won’t quote my own numbers (legal says no), but here’s what changed:
Making the business case without a spreadsheet migraine
- Exposure, not CVEs – Risk is measured in live, exploitable weaknesses, not raw counts.
- Time, not money – Faster remediation means fewer weeks for attackers to roam free.
- Proof, not promises – Dashboards show closed gaps and live safeguards; no one has to “trust the security guy.”
External studies back me up: researchers found 75 % of CVEs are hit within 19 days of disclosure. When you illustrate that timeline on a single slide, budget conversations get strangely cooperative.
Five steps you can borrow (no royalties required)
- Pilot first. Deploy the vRx agent to a noisy but safe corner of your estate. Watch it discover, prioritise and patch before lunch.
- Define SLAs in plain English. Example: “If there’s a working exploit, we fix or shield within three days.”
- Automate boldly, supervise lightly. Let the platform handle scheduling and verification; keep humans for exceptions and pizza.
- Use shields for the un‑patchable. OT boxes, legacy servers and that lab machine running Windows “Antique” all get temporary protection.
- Report like a storyteller. Show the gap shrinking week‑by‑week; sprinkle in one real incident you prevented, not just theoretical charts.
Final thoughts (and one hummus analogy)
I like my hummus smooth, my espresso strong, and my patch gap wafer‑thin. Attackers won’t wait for your next maintenance window; neither should your remediation flow. Automate the boring stuff, shield what you can’t patch, and keep the board focused on time saved, not tools purchased.
See you on the other side of the gap—bring coffee.
