With people across the world encouraged to stay at home to do their part in slowing the spread of COVID-19, many employees are currently working from home. Given the rise of remote workers, addressing security vulnerabilities and organizing software updates have become a top challenge for companies.
SC Magazine enumerates numerous hurdles for patching such as worn-out IT resources, reduced patching time, restricted visibility and access to particular systems, and threats attributed to an overuse of remote tools and measures, which are all caused by the new atmosphere that is being swiftly shaped by the pandemic. Because of this, organizations need to rapidly incorporate strategies to enhance their IT asset management software.
These five tips will help you get the most out of your platform for cloud patch management:
Follow Real-Time Notifications
To never miss out on modifications and every time there’s a software installation on your endpoints, make the most out of your platform’s ability to provide real-time alerts. Most software for IT management is equipped with simple yet powerful means to track the status and condition of assets in real-time. Additionally, these alerts can be sent to you through various channels such as via email, phone, or web service.
Protecting your business’s IT assets and valuables is a vital part of any security program. With IT asset management software, you can guarantee that you don’t lose track of these important items by receiving notifications on the status of your software and hardware.
Take a Dynamic Approach Against Downtime
Downtime is an enormous problem for remote IT management. It pushes back your production clock and lands a blow on your profits. Plenty of organizations succumb to equipment failure rather than performing planned routine maintenance to avoid downtime.
By crafting an effective asset maintenance plan and following through with it with the aid of IT asset management software, you can begin arranging maintenance work and minimizing downtime. While it’s impossible to prevent every possible chance of asset failure, you can still stay on track and have a feeling that you’re running your maintenance operations rather than having it the other way around.
Check for Patch Management Compliance
Every now and then, it’s good to examine your IT assets and ask which ones require important patches. Patches correct security and functionality troubles in software and firmware and are absolutely essential to mitigate and eradicate software vulnerabilities and eliminate chances for exploitation. Apart from this, they also have the ability to incorporate new features to software and firmware, including security functionalities.
Although cloud patch management may sound simple, there are plenty of challenges surrounding it. Last year, CVE Details listed 12,174 vulnerabilities, which makes patching each one a near-impossible job for any one company.
This is why you need to take advantage of the software you’ve acquired to assist you in patch management. Use it to perform a real-time search of total installed Windows updates and patches on everything that encompasses your corporate workstations and make the most out of its features to provide endpoint patch management.
A powerful IT management software can deploy security patches on particular systems as well as install various updates, so make sure to extensively study and test your platform’s features.
Read also: Windows Patch Management
Take Advantage of Time-Saving and Remote Options
Installing software on various devices and checking to see if their most recent updates are issued on time is a complex and laborious job. It becomes even more complicated when the majority of the endpoints are not linked to a corporate LAN, which prompts a never-ending cycle of integration and delivery.
It’s true that manual configuration management is almost impossible, and that’s why you need to maximize the productivity-inducing functions provided by your IT asset management software.
With specially designed software for IT asset management companies, you can easily attain access to full software and hardware inventory as well as view operating systems along with the roster of installed software, including their installation dates, versions, and other essential details. You can also automate software deployments and simplify workflows.
Besides these, you can use your IT asset management software to install or uninstall software packages across various endpoints in your organization. Best of all, you can do this remotely over the network, which is extremely useful in times of crisis such as the present coronavirus pandemic. You wouldn’t even need a group policy to do so. You can also execute a script or a program in various endpoints from your cloud.
Continuously Evolve
To constantly improve, it’s mandatory to regularly refresh your asset database using different techniques. For instance, you can automatically schedule scans to monitor changes like modifications, additions and deletions to the IT asset database.
You have to keep an eye out for continual enhancements by listing organized activities that need to be performed and reviewing previous IT asset management benchmarks. Your IT asset management software can help you with a good chunk of this and provide you with a great opportunity to take stock and determine aspects that still have room for improvement.
Rising Above
The five practices discussed above cover most areas you need to improve your IT asset management software. You need tools to help you effectively achieve your IT asset management objectives, but more importantly, you need to harness these unique solutions so that you can gain an edge above your competitors.
