Systems and methods are disclosed for speedily upgrading (e.g., via service packs) components of a storage management system, such as media agents and data agents, which may number in the thousands. The disclosed methods and systems provide a lightweight and flexible approach. Executable files such as service packs are deployed to a network-shared file system and are served on demand to each targeted host computing device to launch a data agent and/or media agent component. New service packs (e.g., upgrades) are installed on another shared drive and the connection thereto is refreshed by each targeted storage management component to begin executing the new version on demand. The resultant overall upgrade process across the storage management system may be substantially shortened, and the network burden greatly reduced.