Patch Management

In the last 12 months, we have strongly increased our efforts in making your IT systems more secure. We speak to you often about security measures such as MFA (Office 365), Anti-virus (Webroot or Eset), firewalls (Barracuda), backups (StorageCraft) and the need to keep your devices in warranty. Another major component of a compliant IT is system patch management. Microsoft continuously improves their software, and releases updates to keep the operating system of your server, desktop or laptop stable and secure. Rather than leaving it to Microsoft to deploy these patches to your machines, we can do this for you. That way the installation of these updates is managed by us, and you can take measures to prepare for them. We test patches before they are being deployed as much as possible, but cannot verify each patch with each application you use. Sometimes a patch can cause issues, and it is good to know we are here looking after your IT infrastructure.

All our managed clients are now on a patch plan. Patch management is now also available to our Core clients. This saw our level of covered workstations dramatically increase:

But more importantly, the patch compliance has increased as well.  Currently, our patch compliance is 97%. This means that almost all available and approved patches that have gone through our test- and the pilot stage has been installed on the workstations we manage. There can be many reasons why patches are not installed, but the most frequent reason is that devices have not restarted. Your servers will typically restart once per month, depending on the installed patches, but your workstation should be restarted frequently to make it work better. And note: If we don’t have our “ABT Health Monitor” installed on your computer we cannot manage it, and therefore cannot install updates on it.