Configuring Automated Patch Deployment

Need for automated patch deployment:

Patch Management is undoubtedly one of the critical tasks for any IT admin. But, that task is one amongst a million tasks which IT admins should focus on. Patch management activity can take up-to hours and days, which results in meager output when it comes to managing endpoints on the whole. Automating your patch deployments helps you save the manual load invested and also let's you streamline the process. With all the planning done manually, IT admins can automate the deployment of patches thereby achieving better results in a shorter span of time.

IT admins can leverage the below listed benefits when patch deployment is automated:

Benefits of Automated Patch Deployment

1. Deployments are fast, and security is tightened due to the readily available patches for deployment.
2. All the approved patches will be deployed in the very next deployment window immediately after their download. There's no need to wait for the next APD scheduler to invoke the deployment.
3. Whenever the computer in the network goes offline and encounters the network connectivity again, there could be new vulnerabilities and patches that the computer be missing. When the agent comes into contact with the server, it gets automatically scanned in the next refresh cycle, the missing patches are detected and updated in the server. The agent deploys them in the subsequent refresh cycle during the deployment window. Hence, there is no need to worry about the agent contact time and its prolonged vulnerable status.
4. Deployment in agent continues until it gets zero missing patches for the APD criteria.
5. In APD, you can also see the history of patching in a more detailed view.

Pre-requisites:

Configure Patch Database Settings to specify the time interval for the Endpoint Central server to synchronize with the database and collect details of the latest patches available.

After synchronization with the Patch Database, Endpoint Central server will collect details of the latest patches released. In the next refresh policy, Endpoint Central agents will automatically scan the computers to check if the newly available patches are missing. With Automate Patch Deployment, these patches will automatically be deployed without any delay. Automate Patch Deployment task ensures all the computers in the network are fully patched.

Check this page to personalize Automated Patch Deployment(APD) for your network.