Mastering Oracle Quarterly Patches to Ensure Software Resilience
Tags: oracle, quarterly, patches
Published: 2024-03-18 06:31:42

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Oracle is committed to continuous innovation and ensuring its users are not prone to any vulnerabilities in its software products. It releases quarterly security patches, called Critical Patch Updates (CPUs), to address vulnerabilities in its software products. Oracle quarterly patches consist of fixes for vulnerabilities across various Oracle product lines, including databases, middleware, applications, third-party components, and more.

These Oracle quarterly patches are helpful for organizations to add new features and bring enhancements, but they also bring delays, breakages, and operational freezes. So, Oracle applications must stay updated with the patches to avoid any potential threat. That’s where a robust testing strategy comes in. It ensures that unexpected changes don’t occur during implementation of updates. 

**Understanding Oracle Quarterly Patches**

Usually, people get confused about patching, and many organizations don’t prioritize patching. Organizations often ignore the patching due to complex system architecture or lack of knowledge.

However, it can lead to potential vulnerabilities in Oracle Applications. Oracle releases the first Oracle quarterly patches of the year in January to deal with the vulnerabilities. 

**Importance of Oracle Testing for Patches**

You might be wondering why you should care about Oracle quarterly patches; they are essential for your business. With time, the patches become faster and more complicated. Many organizations are moving to the cloud to reap the benefits of the new features. Oracle releases patches for their customers so they can leverage the new features and functionality quickly, which might take years or months.

Since the business risk has increased, Oracle quarterly patches contain various vulnerabilities to protect the system. Moreover, these updates ensure that HCM, Finance, and Supply Chain are working as intended.  

**Best Practise to Make the Best Out of Updates**

**Review and Understand the Updates**

Initiate the update process a month ahead by thoroughly reviewing Oracle’s Application Readiness site. Understand the New Feature Summaries, providing insights into functional updates and security role changes, ensuring your team is well-prepared.

**Update Test Plans**

Following material review, update your test plans, incorporating steps to run through main business processes. Align these plans with the identified new features and changes from the readiness material.

**Check Test Environment**

Verify the integrity of your test cadence environment, ensuring it faithfully mirrors the production setup. If it seamlessly aligns and exhibits the expected functionality, proceed with confidence. However, if active developments in the test environment or discrepancies emerge, strategic scheduling of a Production-to-Test Environment Refresh becomes imperative for realignment.

**Prepare Integration Tests**

The next critical step involves a meticulous review and confirmation of the functionality of all APIs, agents, and back-end processes. This process not only confirms the system’s robustness but also serves as an essential exercise to preemptively identify and address potential disruptions stemming from the impending update.

**Preserve Custom Reports**

Before the quarterly update in the test environment, safeguard custom reports by moving them to a designated “Safe” folder. This prevents overwriting and ensures their availability post-update.

**Testing**

Commence testing immediately after the update in the test environment. Focus on executing integration tests, validating third-party system interactions, testing key business processes, and ensuring the functionality of critical custom reports and workflows. Automated testing is highly recommended for efficiency.

**Log Service Requests In Case of Issues**

If issues arise during testing, log service requests promptly. Clearly, this indicates that the problems were not present before the update. File separate service requests for each identified issue.

**Preserve Custom Reports Again**

Days before the update in the production environment, re-preserve custom reports to prevent overwriting. This ensures the preservation of crucial customized reporting functionalities.

Perform Regression Testing Again in Production Post-Update
Post-update in the production environment and conduct regression testing on main business processes. Verify that the environment update has not adversely affected existing operations, providing a final check for unexpected impacts.

**Why Choose Opkey**?

Opkey is a test automation platform that brings innovation to the test automation industry. It has brought no-code functionality that enables non-tech users to perform testing to ensure your organization has updated to a new patch. It assesses organizational environments to create testing strategies by finding the gap. It comes with thousands of pre-built test cases that help to increase the test coverage. Users can optimize the test with impact analysis, increasing efficiency in the testing environment.

Opkey also comprises self-healing capabilities that reduce the test maintenance effort by 80%. In the end, it provides end-to-end testing to businesses. 

**Wrapping Up**!

Oracle quarterly patches emerge as both a shield and a challenge for businesses. Understanding their significance, implementing robust testing strategies, and adopting best practices for updates become paramount. By embracing a proactive approach, organizations can efficiently protect their systems and leverage new features, ensuring a resilient and secure software environment.