Reduce your attack surface with automated patch and vulnerability management
Endpoint security solutions are overwhelmed with alerts. Alerts are a consequence of exploited vulnerabilities weaponized into an attack on your infrastructure. Reducing your attack surface through proper patch management and endpoint hardening reduces the burden on your security operations and allows your analysts to better utilize their time and resources.
The first step to reducing attack surface is understanding your risk and responding. This starts with Vulnerability Management and Patch Management.
What is vulnerability management?
Vulnerability Management is the process of identifying, cataloging, remediating, and mitigating vulnerabilities found in software or hardware. Software vulnerabilities are the most common and typically solved by network isolation, patching, or configuration management.
Vulnerabilities are normally identified using a scanner or endpoint agent to detect and identify known vulnerabilities.
What is patch management?
Patch Management is the process of identifying, testing, and deploying patches for operating systems or applications on devices to ensure systems stay up to date. Patches are pieces of code added to the existing software code to improve functionality or to remove vulnerabilities discovered in the software.
Patch management tools help orchestrate patch deployment by prioritizing patches and systems they should be installed on.
Vulnerability management vs patch management
Vulnerability Management is traditionally a key component of a full-stack endpoint security architecture. Vulnerability scanners are typically stood up on-premise and scan the environment on a regular cadence. As enterprises move through a cloud transformation, on-premise scanners fall off in efficacy and are being replaced by cloud-based scanners and agent-centric approaches to scanning. Ultimately, these scanning approaches give the user an understanding of known vulnerabilities but do not solve the alert crisis. In a nutshell, vulnerability tools alone are only a discovery mechanism. While some vendors offer add-on tools or services to address vulnerabilities, at the core these tools only discover the issues and leave it to the organizations to remediate them. In turn, this leads to more time and money spent on fixing the newly discovered problems.
Similarly, patch management tools traditionally existed on-premise as a way of distributing patches across an internal network without negatively impacting the network bandwidth for organizations. As enterprises make their cloud transformation, traditional patch management solutions are unable to keep pace, requiring costly and frustrating VPNs, on-premise servers, and skilled analysts to function fully. Traditional patch management tools also rely heavily on the organization knowing what is deployed and maintaining those applications and devices.
Vulnerability management typically resides in security operations while patch management sits in IT operations. A typical workflow would have security operations scanning and detecting a vulnerability, creating a ticket with IT and waiting for IT to both patch and communicate the patch’s success back to security operations to close the loop. This leads to significant time delays between vulnerability detection and remediation.
Automox helps both sides work better!
The Automox Endpoint Hardening platform is a replacement for legacy patching solutions that would traditionally be in the toolbox for analysts working with vulnerability management and remediation tools. With cloud-native patching and configuration management, our solution bleeds the line between patch management and vulnerability management workflows, allowing a more flexible approach to the patch management lifecycle.
The Automox platform helps bridge the gap between security operations and IT operations with automation. Automox accelerates the remediation workflow by proactively identifying missing patches and automatically updating the devices. Because the Automox platform doesn’t require a cumbersome vulnerability scanner, there is no delay associated with remediation. Additionally, Automox can be used by both IT operations and security operations simultaneously. Our solution empowers both organizations to proactively address patch and configuration management, which reduces and manages the number of critical vulnerabilities your organization is exposed to and reduces the attack surface for bad actors to exploit.
Automox helps your organization:
- Improve IT and cyber hygiene
- Reduce attack surface
- Eliminate costly and ineffective legacy on-premise patching tools
- Embrace cloud transformation
- Decrease critical endpoint security alerts
- Automate patch compliance
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.
