KACE Customers Save Time and Money with Automated Patching Capabilities

By Anamika Singh

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

KACE (News - Alert), a company the provides management appliances, announced that its KBOX family of systems management and deployment appliances will help customers adopt  automated, enterprise-class patch management capabilities. This in turn will help customers to save on time and money.

 

Lumension Security's PatchLink (News - Alert) Update assessment and remediation technology that is embedded into KBOX, provides access to patch management engine, a metadata database through Web-based user interface for improved security. A customer example is Kraft Construction. The company experienced first-hand how the automated patching capability of KBOX can improve service. Kraft Construction runs an IT environment with 27 remote sites. The IT team manages 360 workstations and servers across the network.

"Prior to KACE, we manually deployed patches which took way too much of our time and resources," stated Dennis Shelton, Network Manager at Kraft Construction. "In addition to automating our patching deployments — which is an incredible time-saver —  KBOX allows us to specially tailor our patches to certain groups using unique labels With KBOX, I can approve a patch, and assign and deploy it to any group I want in a snap. Because so many of our employees work remotely, this capability also adds to the bottom line. On top of this, I can be confident our systems are protected by the latest security patches available."

Although automated patch management is important in today's complex IT

environments,  it can cause pain because of the large number of patches released every month and requires  tools, resources, and processes to deal effectively with them. KACE and Lumension Securities have been working together as  partners since October 2007, embedding PatchLink Update into KBOX appliances. The combination of PatchLink's security prowess and  KACE's appliance-based approach to systems management and deployment has created a powerhouse-patching solution for midmarket and enterprise organizations  as well.

Security vulnerability detection and remediation are important to protecting resources and correcting security holes that can put data and networks at threat. KBOX patch management features functionality like Lumension's patented Fingerprinting Technology, for highest level of accuracy in detecting security holes. Customers prefer the easy-to-use interface that efficiently schedules, manages, and reports on the detection of vulnerabilities and deployment of patches.

 

KACE is headquartered in Mountain View, California and its KBOX customers include World Book, Bare Escentuals, Denny's, Northwestern University, Columbia University, and Smith & Wesson.

"In a recent survey performed by EMA (News - Alert) on the value of automation disciplines, 84 percent of respondents listed Patch Management as having above average importance in their environments, ranking it second, to only Backup & Recovery, as the most critical automation need," added Enterprise Management Associates analyst Steve Brasen. "KACE is well addressing this market need by integrating Lumension's PatchLink functionality directly into the KBOX so that KACE customers utilize a single, common agent which can be accessed through a single, common Web-based user interface, significantly enhancing both security and ease-of-use."