Introduction

A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance. Though meant to fix problems, poorly designed patches can sometimes introduce new problems (see software regressions). In some special cases updates may knowingly break the functionality, for instance, by removing components for which the update provider is no longer licensed or disabling a device.

Patch management is the process of using a strategy and plan of what patches should be applied to which systems at a specified time.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_%28computing%29