How to Manage Patches for your Entire IoT Fleet

Installing operating systems, firmware, and software patches on devices is a fundamental security protection that is required nearly unanimously across all compliance mandates and frameworks. For organizations implementing Internet of Things (IoT) devices to improve business operations, patch management can often become overwhelming as security and IT teams struggle to create shared workflows across a diverse device landscape, often including multiple patching processes. 

For traditional endpoints, organizations already face significant difficulties trying to patch devices in a timely manner. For example, one 2023 cybersecurity study found that organizations in the information services industry had the oldest cyber vulnerabilities, over 369 days old, on average. 

According to The State of Patch Management report for 2025, 51% of  IT and security teams said patching is a bigger issue than vulnerability detection. Additionally, the research found the following:

• 98% say patching disrupts their work, forcing them to reallocate resources
• 77% need more than a week to deploy patches
• 64% find coordinating between detection and response as their biggest challenge
• 94% of organizations either use or plan to use automation for patch distribution in the next year

For traditional enterprise devices, most organizations have solutions that enable them to identify devices connected to their network and force patch installation across these environments. Despite these capabilities, they still struggle. 

For organizations managing IoT device fleets, the challenges can feel insurmountable. The enterprise IT tools often fail to identify these devices or take them offline with their active scanning technologies. Further, they fail to respond to the unique challenges of applying patches to IoT devices, which can include:

• High volumes of disparate devices, including security cameras, smart TVs, Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
• Inability to track vendor patch releases
• Different patch installation processes across various device manufacturers
• Identifying eligible devices within the context of the organization’s environment

With Asimily’s purpose-built solution, organizations can automate their IoT patch management processes to improve security and compliance. 

5 Ways Asimily Enables Organizations to Improve IoT Fleet Patch Management

While organizations may have tools to identify IoT device vulnerabilities, few of these technologies offer a solution that enables them to detect, test, and install the patches that mitigate risk. Asimily’s IoT risk management platform centralizes the patch management process. After passively scanning networks to identify all IoT devices and vulnerabilities, the Asimily platform takes risk management a step further to automate the patch application process so that organizations can mitigate risk faster. 

1. Know When Manufacturers Release Patches to Stay Up-to-date

Many organizations use manual processes that require them to regularly check manufacturer websites to find updates. Problematically, research notes that IoT vendors often update firmware without changing the version number, finding that 44.3% of patches were implicitly applied. Unfortunately, without changes to versioning, most internal teams have no way to identify whether the IoT devices in their fleets have a security update available. Additionally, the researchers found that IoT vendors’ software-version numbers are unreliable since they often apply security patches without upgrading versions when addressing vulnerabilities. 

Asimily monitors manufacturer repositories to identify security patch updates and notify you about them. Our platform automates the time-consuming security patch update research processes, so you no longer need to worry about inconsistent versioning, and prevents you from having to manually compare source code to identify security patches. 

2. Leverage Pre-Tested Patches to Improve Patching Cadence

Testing patches in development before pushing them to production is necessary and time-consuming. By using a test environment, security and IT teams can monitor the impact that deploying the patch may have on system performance, stability, and device functionality. However, thoroughly testing patches is a time-consuming process. Testing a single patch might take anywhere from 5 to 10 hours, ultimately increasing the time from identifying the patch to deploying it to the production environment. 

Asimily engages in patch testing to actively identify potential issues that could disrupt your IoT devices’ availability. Asimily’s patch testing reduces the time spent preparing patches before deploying them live so that organizations can improve key patch management metrics like:

• Patching cadence: timelines for applying updates
• Time to Turnaround: time spent testing and deploying the patch across the entire IoT fleet

3. Collaborate Across Multiple Stakeholders with a Central Hub

Organizations face challenges as security and IT teams work to improve their patch management processes. According to Gartner, 55% of IT leaders use a shared responsibilities matrix to support IT and security team collaboration, while 55% rely on regular meetings. Additionally, Gartner also found:

• 32% have a centralized communication hub
• 27% have defined communication plans
• 24% have shared dashboards

Since these statistics focus on traditional vulnerability patching processes, IT and security teams face even greater challenges working with IoT devices. Communicating across multiple stakeholders to ensure that everyone manages and tracks the patch deployment processes is time-consuming, especially when working to explain or master different manufacturer patch install processes. 

With Asimily, you gain a centralized hub for documenting, tracking, and managing all supported IoT patching activities. Our platform provides:

• A unified patching process so that your teams no longer have to worry about different manufacturer processes, enabling them to overcome the learning curve and deploy patches faster
• Insight into available firmware versions for documenting and tracking the current version on devices
• Management and tracking functions for gaining compliance insights to prove governance over patching

4. Balance Security and Business Disruption with Scheduled Patching

While testing patches before deployment mitigates risk, some IoT devices are critical to protecting human life. IoT devices in critical infrastructure often impact people’s health and wellness, so an accidental outage arising from the patch deployment process has a more significant impact. A patch update that takes a smart TV offline has a different impact than one that takes a critical device offline. 

Asimily’s IoT Patching solution allows you to set a future date and time for deploying patches. By scheduling when your patches go live, you can minimize operational disruption by:

• Choosing a deployment time outside of traditional business hours
• Monitoring the devices more precisely to identify outages faster

5. Use Bulk and Automated Patching to Eliminate the “Too Many Patches, Too Little Time” Problem

Organizations already struggle to deploy security patches across their traditional devices. When they incorporate their IoT devices into these practices, they expand the number of devices exponentially. According to research, the number of IoT devices with vulnerabilities increased by 136% between 2023 and 2024, identifying NAS, VOIP, IP cameras, and printers as some of the riskiest devices. Additionally, the World Economic Forum noted that a thriving dark web economy exists around targeting IoT devices, making the high volume of vulnerabilities a significant attack vector for organizations. 

To improve security and mitigate attack risks associated with IoT vulnerabilities, you can use Asimily’s IoT Patching solution to scale your patch management processes with:

• Automated patching: availability of new firmware immediately triggers the patching process to reduce attack risk
• Bulk patching: grouping devices to receive patches together to save time

Using our platform as a centralized location for managing all IoT device patch installations, you can improve device security. Additionally, you can mitigate risks that come from patch management teams using shared credentials to apply updates. With our platform, you can manage user credentials across the IoT patch management process and maintain the principle of least privilege so that only the right people can update devices. 

Asimily: Mitigate Risk Efficiently with IoT Patching

Asimily’s purpose-built IoT risk mitigation platform provides visibility into and control over device fleets. With a centralized location for managing the IoT patching process, organizations can improve their overarching security posture by identifying vulnerabilities and installing patches faster. 

With Asimily’s IoT Patch function, security and IT teams can more effectively and efficiently update IoT devices while reducing the operational risks and costs arising from the process. With a centralized location for managing these processes, organizations can monitor for new firmware fixes and then either trigger automatic updates or schedule patch deployments, depending on the risk the vulnerability poses and the impact that service downtime will have. 

To learn more about Asimily and the IoT patch management functionality, reach out now to book a demo.