Every cyberattack reminds us of the importance of patching. With cyberattacks evolving at a dramatic pace, every organization must take necessary precautions to minimize vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure. Ever since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FBI has been receiving as many as 4,000 complaints on cyberattacks per day - a 400 percent increase from what it was during pre-pandemic times.

This is precisely why organizations cannot afford to be lax when it comes to the security updates of their software. A powerful patching tool like Pulseway Patch Management is critical for all MSPs and business organizations.

In this blog, we'll tell you exactly how Pulseway Patch Management can secure your IT environment from unexpected threats and vulnerabilities.

Why You Need Pulseway Patch Management

Cybercriminals actively look for vulnerabilities in software to exploit in order to gain access to an IT environment. The time between a patch release and its installation is extremely critical to maintain security. A patching tool that automates the patching process with the help of policies and schedules is vital to install patches on time and keep all software in your network up to date.

Pulseway's out-of-the-box patch management engine, combined with its automation capabilities, can install, uninstall, and patch your operating systems, third-party software and custom software titles to keep your endpoints secure. With the sheer number of software patches released and endpoints added to IT networks every day, it is impossible to keep track of your patches manually. Pulseway Patch Management simplifies that job for you and keeps your systems up to date at all times.

Now that we have understood the importance of Pulseway Patch Management, let's find out how you can put this tool into action.

Creating Policies

A patching policy is a generalized set of rules applicable to the endpoints in a group. With Pulseway, you can create multiple policies based on the different types of machines and their groups. Once a policy is created, you will be in total control of your OS and application updates. Software patches are obtained directly from the internet and the updates are installed based on the policies created for the machines.

With Pulseway, you can create a restore point during patch installation to ensure that you can revert to the previous version if something goes wrong during an update. Moreover, you can also add settings like ‘'machine reboot'' or ‘'notify users before reboot'' in your patch policies. You can also select “randomize update interval” to prevent network overloading when updates are being downloaded on individual machines. These policies can serve as a template for future updates whenever needed.

Scheduling Updates

Scheduling plays a key role in patch deployment. It allows you to control when your patches get installed and how they get installed. For instance, if you have any concerns that patching can affect your productivity, you can schedule your updates outside of working hours to avoid peak-hour productivity loss. This way, technicians can exercise increased flexibility when updating patches in their vulnerable and non-vulnerable systems.

By automatically scheduling updates, you can control the exact date and time you want to install your patches. The scheduling option in Pulseway allows you to create a regular patching schedule for your updates based on your requirements. You can also create different patching schedules for all your different software products (OS, third-party software, etc.) or machine groups and ensure that they remain up to date.

Apart from automated patching, Pulseway also offers a manual option whereby a technician can view and manually install patches based on already created policies.

Third-Party Titles and Custom Titles

The number of third-party titles available in Pulseway's patch management library keeps growing every month. For all available third-party titles, you can simply define a rule and manage them (install, uninstall or update) based on your requirements. If you have a custom software title that is unique to your IT environment, you can easily add that to the Pulseway library by using its name and the URL for the installer package file. Once you have added your custom titles to Pulseway, you can add them to your policies and specify the machines for which you need them.

Central Management of Pulseway Patching

One of the biggest advantages of Pulseway Patch Management is that you can view, monitor and manage all your patching tasks from a unified, central platform. You can use the Pulseway mobile app to perform these actions from anywhere, anytime. You can also keep track of your patching updates through the history section of the Pulseway platform or the reports generated on your patching tasks. By tracking your patching tasks, you can constantly monitor the health of your IT systems from anywhere.

This is how Pulseway Patch Management ensures your patching is up to date and frees up your time to focus on other IT tasks.

In addition to being a built-in solution in Pulseway RMM, Pulseway Patch is now available as a standalone product.

Watch the training video to see Pulseway Patch Management in action.

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