CEOs, CIOs, CISOs, IT Security Directors & Managers, Compliance and Risk Officers, Internal Audit Managers, Legal Counsels, Procurement and Vendor Managers
You’ve built controls, bought firewalls, hired people. But there’s a rusted hinge in your fortress and it’s not Microsoft Patch Tuesday. It’s the third-party software nobody patches because “it’s someone else’s problem,” “it’s not critical,” or “we’ll get to it next quarter.” That thinking gets companies compromised. Fast.
Stop kidding yourselves: third-party apps are the low-hanging fruit attackers love
Your environment is a tapestry of vendors, libraries, plugins, agents and toolkits. Each one is a potential vector. Attackers don’t target complexity — they target the unpatched. They scan for outdated components, automate exploit chains, and move laterally before your team even finishes their morning coffee. A single unpatched library in a non-critical tool is often all an attacker needs to escalate privileges or exfiltrate data.
Why it happens (and why it’s your problem)
- Siloed ownership: Procurement buys, DevOps deploys, Security gets an alert. Nobody owns the end-to-end lifecycle. Result: gaps.
- Resource theater: Teams triage for “high-severity” vendor patches and deprioritize the rest. Risk accumulates.
- Compatibility fear: “What if the patch breaks production?” becomes an excuse for indefinite delay.
- Visibility blindspots: Shadow software, unsanctioned tools, and legacy agents live under the radar of endpoint and asset inventories.
- Contractual complacency: “Vendor will patch” written in a contract isn’t an operational patch cadence. It’s a promise — not a defense.
The corporate consequences are not hypothetical
Regulatory fines, class-action lawsuits, brand damage, ransomware payouts, lost customers — these are the invoice items you’ll read about on page one if this isn’t solved. And don’t think legal or compliance will be sympathetic when auditors find months of ignored CVEs tied to your vendors.
What leadership must demand — now
This isn’t an IT checkbox. This is board-level risk management.
- Assign accountability end-to-end. One leader — not a committee — owns third-party patch posture and reports to the board monthly.
- Inventory, aggressively. You cannot protect what you cannot see. Automated software-bill-of-materials, continuous scanning of endpoints, and runtime telemetry are table stakes.
- Risk-rate, don’t triage by comfort. Prioritize patches by exploitability and business impact — then remediate or mitigate within defined SLAs.
- Contract the right way. Insert measurable SLAs for security updates, notification timelines, and post-patch verification into vendor contracts. Hold vendors to penalties for noncompliance when critical vulnerabilities are released.
- Patch windows + automated rollback. Test fast, deploy fast, and have automated rollback. The risk of not patching outweighs the risk of a failed update — so stop treating updates like moonshots.
- Budget for automation and staff. Manual patching is archaic and dangerous. Fund tooling and skilled operators who can close the loop.
- Enforce procurement gatekeeping. No vendor gets in without security sign-off and a patch management plan.
Why you need a partner who’s relentless
You can keep hoping your current posture holds. Or you can act like a leader who understands that speed and discipline win. The companies that beat attackers don’t rely on luck — they run repeatable, measurable programs that eliminate opportunities for adversaries to succeed.
If you want this cleaned up — complete inventory, prioritized remediation, vendor SLA enforcement, and a hardened, auditable third-party patch program — bring in a team that does this every day. We don’t sell hope. We deliver control.
Act like the executive responsible for the company’s future. Patch like your balance sheet depends on it — because it does.