SolarWinds released the results of a survey on patch management, and introduced the latest version of SolarWinds Patch Manager, its automated patch management software solution.
The survey, which compiles the responses of over 130 IT professionals, revealed that IT pros spend a substantial amount of time manually patching.
- Almost half of the respondents said their organizations deploy patches one at a time.
- On average, 46 percent said it takes three or more hours per patch to research, script and test third-party patches.
- 23 percent of respondents reported that once the patch has been vetted, a single patch takes up to two to three days to deploy; 13 percent said four to five days and 17 percent said six to seven days.
"Time is a luxury most IT professionals don't have, yet inhibiting critical vulnerabilities through patching is something they can't ignore," said Denny LeCompte, VP of products, SolarWinds. "In the past, patch concerns were primarily about fixing bugs in the product, but organizations not applying security patches to Windows, Flash, Java, and many other third party apps are now prime targets for infestations."
- Over 20 percent of respondents said they had experienced security incidents in the past year that could have been prevented by timely patching.
- 50 percent of those respondents encountered service downtime and consequent revenue blows, 33 percent lost time recovering systems, 3 percent experienced data theft, and 3 percent saw viruses spread.
Designed to help IT pros protect servers, networks and applications against unknown vulnerabilities and pass patch compliance audits, SolarWinds Patch Manager automates the patch management process.
This saves IT pros valuable time and resources by making it easy for users to perform third-party patch management, and take advantage of and extend the capabilities of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or System Center Configuration Manager to report, deploy, and manage third-party and Microsoft patches.
"It used to take four hours per patch for packaging and testing and about a week to deploy each patch," said Jay Harper, IT network administrator at Terminix Service, Inc. "In our experience, it now takes an hour tops with Patch Manager; it is incredible."
What's New in SolarWinds Patch Manager:
- Direct interoperability with the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 and 2007 consoles, with detailed views of third-party application patches and statuses of patch updates for all endpoints
- Integration with SolarWinds' IT management solutions including Network Performance Monitor (NPM), Server & Application Monitor (SAM) and Synthetic End-User Monitor (SeUM) for adjacent viewing of important patch management data like the latest available patches and top 10 missing patches
"Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 works with SolarWinds to help customers keep third-party applications patched, up to date, and secure," said Raul Gonzalez, Senior Business Development Manager, Microsoft Corp. "And this capability is available directly from the Software Library page of the System Center Configuration Manager console."
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