Detect. Prioritize. Patch. Automate end to end.
Business challenge
Many organizations face overwhelming patching complexity, managing thousands of assets and a constant flow of vendor updates that require coordination across multiple teams—application owners, developers, security and operations. This multi-stakeholder, resource-intensive process is prone to delays and nearly impossible to manage manually. As the number of applications grows, the volume of patching demands rises exponentially, making manual methods increasingly unsustainable.
Companies juggle thousands of assets and constant vendor updates, making manual patching unmanageable.
Exploits often appear within days, but companies take weeks or months to patch.
Patching workflows that are largely manual—from preparation to execution and documentation—carries a high risk for errors. This burdens IT teams and slow down the process significantly.Â
Regulations (PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST and others) require timely patching, but compliance often lags behind reality.
IBM meets the challenge
IBM® Concert® automates end-to-end patch management by integrating continuous vulnerability detection, AI-driven risk prioritization and orchestrated patch deployment across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. Concert supports operating system patching, with container and language environment patching on the product roadmap to extend coverage even further.
By replacing manual patching with intelligent automation, Concert enables companies to deploy patches up to ten times faster, reduce the median time to patch and lower their operational cost. This efficiency frees IT staff to focus on higher-value initiatives while strengthening the security of the entire IT environment.
Reduce blind spots and ensure no unmanaged assets slip through the cracks
Concert aggregates application data from multiple sources—including vulnerability scanners, IT infrastructure monitors, application inventories and the CVE database—to automatically build your application topology. This gives teams a holistic view of where patches are needed, which assets are affected and the severity of each vulnerability.
Prioritize CVEs, cut wasted effort on low-risk vulnerabilities
Concert applies generative AI to weigh risk and business context and comes up with a risk score. Factors considered include dependency mapping, system topology, service criticality, maintenance windows and organizational priorities. Instead of a generic “apply all patches” approach, the Concert AI engine produces optimized patch plans that balance speed, risk and uptime.
Reduce manual intervention and allow patching at scale
Concert supports operating system patching across Windows Server, Red Hat® and other Linux distributions. It can leverage tools such as Ansible® Playbooks—in AWS or other environments—to execute patch rollouts during defined maintenance windows, ensuring reliable deployment with minimal downtime and alignment to business schedules.
Looking ahead, planned roadmap features will extend Concert patch management capabilities to containers and modern language environments, delivering comprehensive coverage for evolving IT landscapes.
Automate patching end-to-end
Concert is easy to use and built to handle customer environments of any complexity, automating not just patching itself but the entire end-to-end patch management process. By eliminating manual effort, Concert reduces administrative overhead and human error while also lowering the total time and cost of patching. This gives IT teams the bandwidth to focus on innovation and other higher-value initiatives.
Real world application
Deutsche Telekom selects IBM Concert to accelerate IT processes with AI-powered automation
"We were looking for a standalone solution on the market that combines all the complex aspects of patch management and reliably automates everything."
Dr. Peter Leukert, Group CIO of Deutsche Telekom
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