Mac Patch Management 101

To reduce the risk of vulnerabilities, IT administrators must ensure the devices they manage, which sometimes includes Mac devices, have the latest updates installed, even if support for Mac is not their major competency. 

With automated tools for patch management included in MacOS, the process is completely standardized, so you can treat Windows and Mac the same. In other words, it’s possible to approve, schedule and deploy patches using the same set of workflows, irrespective of the operating system. 

Mac patch management involves managing your MacOS endpoint by gathering a complete list of every missing patch through a scan, testing them and rolling them out into the production environment for deployment. Therefore, Mac patch management involves protecting your company device against threats and vulnerabilities. 

Mac Patch Management

In recent years, the use of Mac operating systems in enterprises has been increasing. With limited manpower, IT administrators find it hard to patch all Mac security updates and third-party updates manually. This is why having the right Mac patch management tool is essential. 

Mac patch management tools help discover vulnerabilities in MacOS and group the patches by severity rating from high to low. With a patch management tool, you can quickly assess the health of your IT environment by glancing at the system health policy. You can patch critical vulnerabilities by using the automated patch deployment feature or through manual deployment. 

Supported MacOS versions

Patch Manager Plus supports patch management for the following versions:

• OS X 10.12 - Sierra
• OS X 10.7 – Lion
• OS X 10.9 – Mavericks
• OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard
• OS X 10.11 - El Capitan
• OS X 10.8 - Mountain Lion
• OS X 10.13 - High Sierra
• OS X 10.10 - Yosemite
• OS X 10.15 – Catalina
• OS X 10.14 - Mojave
• OS X 12 – Monterey
• OS X 11 - Big Sur 

Mac Patch Management Strategies 

You can patch your Mac machines either by deploying patches manually or by automating this process using a patch management solution.

• Manual Patch Management 
• Automated Mac Patch Management

How to Manually Patch Your Mac Devices

You can decide to deploy a manual patch on your Mac device by going to the App Store and getting new updates. Ensure the device in your organization is up-to-date to prevent threats and exploitation of vulnerabilities. IT administrators need to focus more on vulnerability management to ensure work processes are not altered by negative cyber activities. 

IT professionals can select the options that suit them. These are two ways for downloading third-party updates for Mac:

1. Download the third-party updates manually whenever they are released.
2. Enable automatic updates for each application, so that when updates are available they will automatically be downloaded. 

Why Do You Need Automated Mac Patch Management Software?

Manual deployment may become time-consuming and tedious for Mac patch management. For instance, if an organization has 2,000 systems in its network and a patch needs to be downloaded for each computer, a lot of bandwidth will be consumed. This is where automation comes in handy. 

There are many software patching tools that offer complete automation with automated patch deployment (APD). Utilizing one of these tools can increase the efficiency of the labor-intensive patch management process.

How Does Automated Mac Patch Management Software Work?

These tools offer real-time visibility, unified management, and deployment of patches to all Mac endpoints from a single console. Mac patch management software offers you a complete list of inventories on the missing patches and it allows you to decide how and when you wish to deploy them with the deployment policies characteristics. Therefore, you can personalize deployment based on what works best for you. 

Benefits of Mac Patch Management?

Accurate Reporting

Accurate and beneficial reports with just a single click. Streamline everything you need to know about your patch status and gain more insights on your day-to-day patching tasks. This will help your organization prevent cyber attacks.

Centralized Patch Management

Patch management will help you manage multiple Macs devices running different operating systems from a central point and offer end-users greater visibility. 

Compliance

Every IT organization dreams of getting 100% patch compliance in their networks. IT administrators can achieve this through effective compliance management, which involves checking the health of your devices, patching them, and reviewing the patch compliance report to know if you have achieved your objective. 

Other Benefits Of Mac Patch Management Include:

• Providing flexible parameters and delivering patches to meet the needs of the environment.
• Automated patching capabilities for Mac software.
• Automated responses to monitoring alerts.
• Configure and schedule reports.
• Extensive library of pre-built scripts and policies.
• Support for large and complex networks with policy-based patch approvals, local caching and device-level compliance reporting.

Vicarius is a vulnerability remediation software that targets cybersecurity officers as well IT managers and operators from the U.S. market. Explore fully-featured and effective techniques of our patch management software with a free trial.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Mac patch management involves protecting your company device against threats and vulnerabilities.