Glossary
Patch cadence
How often a system gets a planned maintenance window. Usually derived from how exposed the host is and how critical the system on it is.
Also calledpatching frequency · maintenance cadence
The rhythm at which a system receives a planned window — every three months, every six, or otherwise. Cadence is a policy decision rather than a technical one, and it follows mostly from two things: how exposed the host is, and how much an outage of it costs.
The logic is deliberately asymmetric. An externally reachable host gets the tighter cadence, because erring towards under-patching costs exposure while erring towards over-patching costs a window. The two errors are not equivalent.