Patch Management and Compliance Questions

Comprehensive governance and operational practices for planning, testing, deploying, verifying, and reporting on patches and software updates across systems and applications. Candidates should be prepared to discuss patch program policies, vulnerability and risk assessment, and prioritization of updates by severity and business impact, as well as asset inventory and dependency management. Coverage includes testing and staging practices such as nonproduction environments, canary and phased rollouts, rollback and remediation planning, emergency or out of band patching for critical vulnerabilities, scheduling and maintenance window planning, and reboot planning. It addresses integration with vulnerability management and configuration management, automation and orchestration using patch management and configuration management platforms, and examples of Windows focused tooling such as Windows Update for Business, Windows Server Update Services, System Center Configuration Manager, and Microsoft Intune alongside cross platform orchestration approaches. Also includes change control and coordination with application owners and operations teams, verification of patch success and integrity checks, audit logging and event monitoring, compliance reporting and documentation for regulatory frameworks, implementation of security configuration baselines and system hardening, mitigation strategies when patches are not available, and metrics and key performance indicators to measure patch program effectiveness. Emphasis is on balancing security urgency with operational stability while maintaining auditability and regulatory compliance.