With attacks becoming more sophisticated and remote endpoints increasing, as more employees work remotely and IT infrastructures move to the cloud, patch management has become key to reducing your attack surface.
Executives are more concerned with data security and looking for ways to improve their security posture. One of the best ways to do it is with an automated patch management solution. These solutions reduce the manual burden of patching, provide greater patch confidence, patch multiple operating systems as well as 3rd party applications, and include detailed reporting. By automating your patching process, you can save time, money and resources while improving your data security. Here are some other benefits of automated patch management:
Improved endpoint security
Most organizations today have thousands of endpoints that connect to the infrastructure remotely, making it more difficult to protect the software and hardware of these devices. With a cloud-native automated patch management solution, you can ensure that any client or server that accesses the company remotely is protected at all times. Without this type of automated solution, it is nearly impossible for SysAdmins to track and patch remote clients and servers on a routine basis. And, as modern malware adopts new techniques that allow it to spread quickly throughout a network, even one unpatched remote device can lead to the entire network being compromised.
Increased IT team effectiveness
Manual patch management can be a huge time-suck for IT teams. Identifying vulnerabilities, figuring out which endpoints need patches, and then remediating each endpoint individually is an ineffective use of time and resources. Additionally, this work is not typically scheduled, which means pulling the team off of higher priority projects, resulting in a frustrated team and missed deadlines.
Automated patch management removes many of the manual steps from the patching process, automatically performing regular system checks, downloading patches, and deploying them across the infrastructure based on your process. Automation turns patching into a routine that takes minutes per day and reduces the time spent on patching activities by 90%. Now IT teams can focus their attention to other critical tasks.
Greater awareness and visibility
As networks grow in size and new devices and applications are added regularly, maintaining situational awareness of your entire environment is difficult. The ability to process and store all relevant information is limited, meaning patches may be missed, devices may go untracked, and shadow IT applications may proliferate.
Automated patch management brings this task into a computerized system that keeps inventory of all devices and installed software, checks for updates, and groups patches based on level of severity. Advanced patch automation solutions like Automox provide full inventory visibility and detailed reports that can easily be accessed, so that when a new attack strikes, security teams and executives have the data they need to understand their risk profile in real time.
Accurate compliance reporting
As regulations around data protection become stricter, reliable compliance reporting is a growing need for organizations. Failure to prove compliance can result in fines and other penalties, and using a manual patch management process makes adhering to strict regulations difficult. Many regulations include a specified time period by which patches have to be applied, and manual processes often fail to adhere to this time period.
With automated patch management, companies can be compliant and keep accurate records on compliance without needing to compile data from several different systems. Solutions like Automox patch Mac, Linux, and Windows systems as well as many popular 3rd party applications, and provide up to the minute patch status data for all systems via one dashboard.
Make the switch to automated patch management
Manual patch management simply can’t keep up with the complexity of today’s environments, and automated patch management systems are no longer a costly on premise solutions aimed only at the enterprise. Employing an automated patch management system will save your organization time and money, while improving security and allowing your IT team to focus on other imperative issues.
Automox for Easy IT Operations
Automox is the cloud-native IT operations platform for modern organizations. It makes it easy to keep every endpoint automatically configured, patched, and secured – anywhere in the world. With the push of a button, IT admins can fix critical vulnerabilities faster, slash cost and complexity, and win back hours in their day.
Grab your free trial of Automox and join thousands of companies transforming IT operations into a strategic business driver.
