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Patch Tuesday updates are released on the second Tuesday of every month, which means that we should be getting them tomorrow. While they are generally quite useful, they can interrupt business continuity to some extent, especially for organizations with large fleets of devices. To work around this problem, Microsoft is encouraging customers to leverage hotpatch updates.
For those unaware, hotpatch updates are referred to as "B" releases. They serve as an extension of Windows Update and require deployment via Autopatch. The main benefit of hotpatch updates is that they"re extremely small in size since they only contain security fixes, which is very different from the approach that cumulative updates take on Patch Tuesday each month.
The smaller size of hotpatch updates ensures that bandwidth utilization is minimal, installation is faster, and compliance is achieved more efficiently. What"s more is that hotpatch installations don"t require a device restart since only "in-memory code changes" are delivered to plug security holes. Microsoft says that, in some cases, hotpatch updates are 10x smaller than regular cumulative updates.
Cumulative updates tend to be relatively bigger because they contain fixes and features from previous releases too, which means that if a device installs the latest update, it receives all the previous changes too. In contrast, hotpatch releases only contain security fixes that are applied incrementally on the baseline update, which is rolled out incrementally.
The baseline update is similar to the cumulative update and is released four times a year (January, April, July, October). Meanwhile, hotpatch releases are deployed in the two months between each baseline update. If you"re eager to leverage hotpatch installations, make sure to check out the guide here. The next baseline update, which requires a device restart, is landing tomorrow, while the subsequent two monthly updates will be hotpatches that won"t mandate a device restart.