What Is Patch Management as a Service (PMaaS) & What Can It Do For You? – Source: heimdalsecurity.com

What to do if you don’t have the time, workforce, or knowledge to deal with Patch Management? We’ve got the solution for you. More and more vulnerability management vendors have begun to offer services that do all the heavy lifting. This is known as Patch Management as a Service (PMaaS) and today, we are going to dive into this subject. But first…

What Is Patch Management?

Patch management is the process of identifying, acquiring, installing, and verifying patches for software products. A patch is a code change designed to fix a bug or improve a product’s performance.

Patches play a crucial role in keeping your IT assets up-to-date. However, in today’s heavy workload in IT operations, patching often takes a back seat. Despite the frequent reports about vulnerabilities and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), many organizations still delay installing critical patches for months.

Doing patch management manually can also lead to human error. This could result in vulnerabilities being left exposed, or even causing apps to slow down due to missed or wrong patches. Here is where security service providers come into play.

What Is Patch Management as a Service (PMaaS)?

Patch management as a service is a cloud-based solution that helps organizations automate the process of patching their systems and applications. By using PMaaS, organizations can free up IT staff to focus on more strategic tasks, while still ensuring that their systems are properly patched and secure.

PMaaS can be used to patch both on-premises and cloud-based systems. For on-premises systems, it is used to automate the process of downloading and installing patches from vendors, and for cloud-based systems, to automatically apply patches provided by the cloud provider.

Could Patch Management as a Service Be the Solution to Vulnerabilities?

Patching truly holds significant value, no doubt about it. It might sound surprising, but there are still obsolete systems like Adobe Media Player and Microsoft Silverlight in use out there (although they are unsupported and full of security issues). A solid patch management service catches these scenarios and either fixes them up or gets rid of them.

And the good part is that it’s budget-friendly. The monthly fee covers all your patching needs, giving you the latest and greatest patch technology without the hassle of upgrading your setup or getting new licenses.

Benefits of PMaaS

• Increase in Productivity: Patch management can be time-consuming, and will take away the focus of your staff members from processes that are more urgent. By implementing an automated patch solution, not only will the productivity in your company increase, but also the security.
• Boost in Functionality: Patches can also improve the features of installed programs, not only fix software flaws discovered by developers.
• Old Software Detection: This solution will assist you in locating the software that has not gotten updates in a considerable amount of time, allowing you to promptly replace it if your software vendor is out of business or experiencing another issue.
• Ensured Regulation Compliance: By automating your patch management process, you will no longer have to deal with the stress of compliance regulation, as your software will always be in conformity with the latest regulations.

How Can Heimdal® Help Your Business?

We know patching can be both time-consuming and confusing sometimes. Heimdal® Security’s Patch & Asset Management solution is a hyper-automated tool, that you govern. This solution will help you achieve compliance, mitigate exploits, close existing vulnerabilities, deploy updates, and install software on your machines from anywhere in the world.

Heimdal® Security’s Patch & Asset Management solution provides you with both Automated Vulnerability management, and full Inventory Management, to help you see all the software assets of your business, their installed volume, and current operating version. With the inventory in place, you can:

• Update or downgrade any software or OS
• Uninstall a supported software you want to target
• Install software to more or all your systems
• Allow users to install approved software
• Deploy software to the endpoints, including custom packages
• Set the time you want to update

Fully Customizable

The solution is fully customizable, meaning that it will suit the exact needs of your business, but it also works as set-and-forget for hyper automated deployment of software and updates. The updates are delivered fully repackaged, ad-free, and tested.

Infinity Management

Additionally, you can get unlimited software flexibility and full Software Asset Management (SAM) with Infinity Management.

The Infinity Management module will allow you to deploy any software, at any location, whenever you want.

Infinity Management uses Heimdal® Global CDN infrastructure for deployment and makes use of encrypted packages and encrypted transport. This implies that a safe server is always close to your endpoint. You may schedule the deployment to match the demands of the local endpoints, and you have access to any location in the world. You can also provide users the freedom to install it themselves.

Conclusion

Patch management is an important process in keeping your business secure and away from threats, but sometimes it can prove to be either time-consuming, complicated or even both.

The PMaaS solution will take care of the patching burden for you and will make sure that your business is running appropriately, not under the continuous stress of vulnerabilities or threat actors.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What are the main categories of patch management?

The three primary categories of patches include security patches, bug fixes, and feature updates.

2. Is patch management part of ITIL?

As per ITIL best practices, patch management is categorized under Release Management and holds significant importance for bug resolution, security vulnerability management, and feature enhancement.

3. What is SCCM patch management?

System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is a software management suite from Microsoft designed to help IT teams effectively manage Windows-based computers. Among its array of capabilities, SCCM is frequently utilized by organizations to distribute updates and security patches across their network.

4. Who is responsible for patch management?

For a patch management program to work effectively and achieve success, it’s best for security teams not to handle the patch distribution directly. Instead, the responsibility should fall on IT operations teams and system administrators who can handle the patching process. Moreover, patching should be managed with a clear focus on priority, following defined standard operating procedures for efficient implementation.

5. What is patching lifecycle?

The patching lifecycle refers to the complete journey that a software patch or update goes through, from its initial development and release to its eventual deployment and monitoring. This lifecycle typically involves several stages, including identification of vulnerabilities, development of patches, testing, approval, deployment, and ongoing monitoring. Each stage plays a crucial role in ensuring that patches are effectively and safely applied to software systems to enhance security and performance.