ROLLING REVIEW: LANDESK PATCH MANAGER

Rolling Review: LANDesk Patch Manager

LANDesk software’s Patch Manager is offered on its possess and as a factor of LANDesk’s Security Suite or Management Suite; we proven exclusive Patch Manager. Like the another threesome tools we’ve awninged thusly farther in this Rolling Review, LANDesk Patch Manager uses copyrighted agents installed on direct devices. In testing, Patch Manager provided complete danger brainstorm and remediation, as substantially as a burly clothing of tools to make those tasks. LANDesk permits direction of end devices via existing directory structures, same Active Directory, or finished groups created in the application.

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>> See every our Reports <<Patch Manager’s intimate of patches crapper be customized, and the grouping supports a sort of operative systems, including Mac OS X, Red Hat and SUSE Linux, Solaris, and Windows, as substantially as most ordinary applications, from Apple’s iTunes to Sun’s JRE, nonnegative favourite antivirus systems, including those from McAfee, Sophos, and Symantec. At falsehood we only designated the applications we desired to construe and downloaded pertinent patches. Scans crapper be enabled with an “autofix” functionality–unique among products we’ve reviewed so far–that will automatically deploy patches when Patch Manager finds a vulnerability. This haw seem same an captivating capability, but it’s essential to good effort patches before actuation them discover to production, so travel with caution. Instead, we’d propose the asking option, in which Patch Manager alerts IT by e-mail or pager when a danger of a presented rigor is discovered.

LANDesk also supports a policy-based implementation, where you crapper delimitate the types of patches you poverty to establish and when. While distributing packages, we could ingest features same targeted multicast, which minimizes bandwidth consumed, or person download, which capitalizes on topical bandwidth by distribution packages already downloaded by digit businessperson on a presented subnet. Pretty cool.

Moreover, these features enable pre-staging of patches, allowing for modify more plasticity than the customary planning options we’ve seen. LANDesk also impressed us with Patch Manager’s listing scan. In our environment, it provided a astonishingly complete fleshly listing of servers.