Regular and consistent patching is critical to ensuring every endpoint is up-to-date and compliant with your corporate policies. Speed is also of the essence for patch management to ensure you can secure your endpoints faster than they can be exploited. Finding an efficient way to patch both servers and workstations quickly and easily has been a constant struggle for many IT departments.

Your organization’s servers as well as your employees’ devices are often the first stop for bad actors to exploit. Whether it's a laptop, desktop, mobile device, or server, every endpoint in your environment is an attack vector.

In the past, IT teams may have viewed servers as both the most vulnerable point in their infrastructure as well as the most important with the most critical and valuable data (often referred to as the “crown jewels”) stored on servers. 

Today, user devices, from laptops to workstations, are now just as, if not more, vulnerable than servers. Often, these devices have more applications installed than servers, are managed by users who do not view security as a priority, and due to the sheer number of these devices, may not be regularly maintained by IT teams.

Additionally, the approach taken by IT for servers and devices is different. 

• If a server goes down through an attack, business operations could be down with it. This is a black eye for the company publicly and can impact its current and future revenues.

• Patching of devices, while important to prevent access to the network, is often considered less critical to business operations. If a laptop gets hit with ransomware or becomes bricked, typically it may just be an inconvenience, but business continues to operate.

Service outages can also become costly very quickly depending on the up-time language in service level agreements (SLAs) with customers.

Ensuring every endpoint is up-to-date, configured, and compliant with your corporate policies can be overwhelming. On top of that, you’re managing both devices and servers, all located across an expansive environment of the cloud, on-prem, and remote sites.

Servers often consist of several configurations, including Windows and Linux distros, and device usage includes a mix of Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Added to that are multiple versions of each OS and numerous applications that run on both servers and devices, which also need to be patched to prevent exploitation. In fact, 62% of IT pros say staying on top of new OS and app versions are most difficult to maintain.

Third-party software, while also incredibly important to maintain, is often inherently more difficult to patch with IT teams often having to use multiple tools to cover their bases, making workflows overcomplicated and clunky.

On-prem and legacy endpoint management solutions struggle to maintain servers and devices within the confines of their architecture while manual processes create backlog and frustration for staff. In order to efficiently manage patches across all servers and devices, IT teams need a cloud-native, VPN-free, and automated patch management solution.

Legacy solutions struggle to manage devices and servers across environments that have cloud and on-prem workloads. Cloud-enabled patch management solutions typically don’t require infrastructure investments or maintenance, so they save time and money with access to every device, even remotely, without a VPN.

Where keeping up with bad actors through manual patching can add risk (while IT works through their hundreds of patches), automation can give your organization the upper hand by remediating your endpoints before adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities.

Automox is an example of a modern, cloud-native, VPN-free patch management solution that automates the patching process for all connected servers and devices across OSs, providing a single source of truth for patching mixed environments and third-party applications.

Automox has ushered in a new approach to all-purpose endpoint management – one that’s simple, consolidated, automated, and comprehensive addressing both servers and devices. VPN-free with a lightweight agent, Automox simplifies endpoint management while removing any reliance on inconsistent connections to take action. With a single platform to address all of your endpoints and automation to lighten your workload, Automox can help you shed complex and unnecessary tools with a single platform.