Grant McGregor recommends the use of Heimdal Patch Management to our customers. It’s an easy way to ensure your organisation reduces cyber security risk. Here’s why.

In business and in IT, we hear a lot about the benefits of automation and the possibilities it has to transform business operations and to drive efficiencies. This isn’t science fiction – it has everyday applications in many different ways: from chatbots answering simple customer service enquiries to building management systems helping to switch off lights and regulate heat on the path to net zero.

But, in our opinion, nowhere is automation more simple to introduce and so rewarding to apply than in the case of automatic patching and security updates.

What problem is this answering?

You’re probably aware that software firms release regular patches and updates that have been designed to address particular vulnerabilities in the software or newly identified security risks.

These patches need to be installed across your IT environments as quickly as possible – otherwise you leave your organisation unnecessarily vulnerable.

It’s one of the fundamentals of Cyber Essentials: the NCSC has identified it as one of the most obvious and critical risks to an organisation’s cyber security.

Yet we also know that more than half of IT professionals don’t have the time or the resources to apply patches regularly.

It’s one of the reasons that exploits like the wide-ranging WannaCry attack that affected so many businesses and many parts of the NHS in 2017 was so successful – even though Microsoft had released a patch that fixed the vulnerability a month before the attack.

Why is an automated solution the best way to go?

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)(1) has said that “patching remains the single most important thing you can do to secure your technology, and is why applying patches is often described as 'doing the basics'. But although applying patches may be a basic security principle, that doesn't mean it's always easy to do in practice.”

This is why we advocate automating as much of the process of patching vulnerabilities and keeping your operating systems and software up to date as you can.

This is exactly what the Heimdal Patch Management solution has been designed to do. It’s used by more than 6,000 companies around the world to help them keep their patching up to date and to close known vulnerabilities that are easy pickings for hackers and malicious actors.

Why Heimdal?

The Heimdal solution is a great solution for most businesses. It is super easy to deploy. It is flexible and easy to use and it will help you manage patching for most of your business applications. It has an extension so that you can even manage the patching and upgrades of your bespoke or internal software applications.

Heimdal says, “Our Automated Patch Management solution will automatically install updates based on your configured policies, without the need for manual input. As soon as third-party vendors release new patches, our technology silently deploys them to your endpoints, without the need for reboots or user interruption.”

Furthermore, it offers an intuitive dashboard from where you can manage your estate and all your patching rollouts. And, if you prefer, we can manage the processes on your behalf.

The information then stored in the system can be used as a register for security audits and for accreditations such as Cyber Essentials.

Most importantly, it makes it easy for you to protect your organisation from some of the most common forms of cyber-attack.

Next steps?

If you think that Heimdal could be of benefit to your organisation, please reach out to our team today for more information.

If you’d like to understand more about the role Heimdal can play in helping you achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation, our team can offer advice on this too. 

Sources:

1. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/the-problems-with-patching