A cornerstone of cybersecurity, patch management is now more critical than ever as organizations face increasing risks from data breaches, ransomware, and other costly cyberattacks. The surge in software vulnerabilities, the relentless pace of cyber threats, and the growing scale and complexity of applications, environments, and data that must be safeguarded all make effective patch management even more challenging.
Financial institutions, regardless of size, acutely experience these challenges. The sensitive data they manage, the critical nature of their operations, their scale, and the high stakes of their business make them prime targets for cyberattacks. These organizations often struggle to keep up with software patching, not only to defend against threats but also to meet strict regulatory and compliance requirements.
Regulation set by various agencies across the world requires that core banking systems are patched on a quarterly schedule, with critical fixes patched within 24–48 hours, payment processing and fraud detection systems require monthly updates and immediate fixes for high-risk issues or breaches. Online and mobile banking apps require biweekly updates and critical fixes within 7 days. ATM operations software must be patched monthly and critical patches within 72 hours, and so on.
Various regulatory bodies and standards worldwide enforce these standards. In the US, these include the Federal Reserve (Fed), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and others. In other regions, institutions like the European Banking Authority (EBA), European Central Bank (ECB), European Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, Central Bank of the UAE, Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), and more enforce comparable requirements.
These organizations face a relentless patching cycle because of the fast-evolving threat landscape and the complexity of their technology stacks. These stacks often include dozens, sometimes hundreds, of interdependent components, from operating systems to application tiers, that require regular patching across various environments. All of this must be managed under strict service-level objectives (SLOs), security, and compliance requirements. Siloed processes, manual handoffs with many patch operations still tracked using spreadsheets and emails, and skills shortage further exasperate the problem.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Fleet Application Management simplifies centralized management, IT automation, and full-stack patch compliance at scale for any technology deployed in OCI. With auto-discovery of software inventory and patch data, easy management with Fleets, and a catalog of prebuilt, customizable automation Runbooks, the service enhances standardization, governance, and operational efficiency across the enterprise.
By reducing the complexity, effort, and cost around Day 2 patch operations customers improve IT productivity and help ensure that they’re always up to date on the latest patches, reducing risk and enhancing their compliance and security posture.
The service provides the following features and benefits:
Easy management with fleets: Organize cloud resources across your portfolio in hierarchical groupings based on the type of resource, environment, installed software, business applications, or custom tags. Centralize operations by reporting, managing, and applying patches and updates across the entire fleet with one click.
Support any environment: Consolidate patch and IT operations across OCI, multicloud, hybrid and on-premises infrastructure (coming soon)
Enable continuous compliance: Automatic discovery of the software inventory deployed in your fleets with its patch compliance data, audit reports against policy rules, and automatic drift detection. These features help ensure that you’re always running the latest, most secure patch version.
Full-stack touchless patch management: Easily patch specific components, an entire stack, or roll out a patch across thousands of resources. Hardened processes, state management, and validation of the patch are handled automatically. Schedule touchless patching to run during specific maintenance windows or trigger patching on-demand to remediate compliance issues.
Out-of-the-box patching for Oracle Products and popular technologies: Prebuilt runbooks enable automatic discovery and patching of Oracle Linux and Oracle Fusion stack, which are prevalent in Oracle industry applications, including Oracle Banking, Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM), WebLogic, Java, Exadata Database service, and more. Windows, Apache Tomcat, and other technologies are also supported, with more being added. You can also customize the runbooks to enable patching of other third-party software or to support your specific processes.
Powerful IT automation with runbooks and scheduler: Intuitive GUI, customizable prebuilt runbooks, and the ability to connect existing automation scripts enable you to trigger patches and other IT processes based on compliance and environment state, governance policies, recurring schedule, or maintenance window.
Stop chasing spreadsheets or manual processes, scrambling to fix deployment failures, or losing sleep over your next audit. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Fleet Application Management takes the pain out of software patching and compliance management at scale, for both Oracle technologies and any other software in your stack.
To learn more about the service, see the following resources:
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