Avast reports that, since 55% of installed software on PCs worldwide out of date, their new service will help small businesses prioritise, manage and deploy critical security updates.
Avast has launched a new Patch Management service to help small and mid-sized businesses manage necessary security updates more easily and efficiently. Around 50% of software vulnerabilities exploited occur within 2-4 weeks of a software update being released. However, the time-intensive evaluation and required testing of patches means businesses on average take 120 days to implement the updates. This exposes them to severe risk.
Avast Business Patch Management will automatically identify critical patches, prioritise their deployment, and monitor the outcome to maintain security integrity.
“Most small to mid-sized businesses understand how important patching is, but the simple truth is that no-one likes to patch and often the IT team is only one person who is overloaded with tasks,” said Arne Uppheim, Product Management Director, Avast Business. “Patching interrupts critical systems, causes a loss of productivity, and potentially even problems with other integrated systems. On the other hand, not patching exposes the business to data loss and stolen intellectual property, downtime through lengthy remediation, questionable data recovery, and ongoing reputational harm. We are making it easy for our small and medium-sized business customers and our channel partners to identify and deploy critical patches, and monitor ongoing activity from our central Patch Management dashboard.”
In a study using its Security Site Assessment tool, Avast Business found only 304 of the 500,000 devices analysed were 100% patched, which is less than 1%.
Key features include:
- Flexible deployment schedules: IT teams can schedule and deploy approved patches at desired times on a regular basis, or manually deploy to groups or individual devices.
- Automatic scans: IT can schedule patch scans to run automatically every 24 hours and set patches to deploy automatically every Thursday. These default settings can be customised at any time.
- Intuitive dashboard: This allows businesses to manage all software patches and view graphical summaries of installed, missing, or failed patches from any device.
- Customisable patches: IT can choose software vendors, products, and the severity of patches to scan and install, and easily create exclusions for applications.
- Master agent capabilities: This enables businesses to download all missing patches to a master agent that seamlessly distributes patches to all managed devices in the network.
- Patch scan results: Teams can view detailed results from the management platform that includes information on missing patches, severity levels, knowledge base links, release dates, descriptions, and more.
- Advanced reporting: This helps to easily determine the health and security of device software with a variety of easily configurable reports.
- Thousands of patches: Teams can deploy patches for Windows Operating Systems and thousands of other third-party software applications for comprehensive protection.
