Patch management: Balancing security, stability, and speed

## Executive summary The report reviews a July 2024 outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update that rendered systems unusable and affected roughly 8.5 million Windows devices, and uses the incident to illustrate risks of the n-1 patching strategy, the trade-offs of automatic updates versus staged deployments, and the importance of testing, staged rollouts, and strict execution controls to mitigate supply-chain and update-related risks.