Work-from-anywhere reality makes patching especially labor-intensive and causes IT teams to work overtime double-checking if all updates are deployed successfully. Otherwise, missing updates can let threat actors exploit security vulnerabilities, leading to data breaches and costly compliance fines.
To enable you to mitigate security and non-compliance risks in response to escalating cyber threats and strengthened regulations the new Action1 platform has just been released! With Action1, you can intelligently automate patching and remediation of security vulnerabilities across your endpoints and monitor patching results in real-time.
To help you navigate through over 400 new features and improvements, we’ve compiled the top seven most-awaited and now available features:
- Patch Management Dashboard provides comprehensive visualization on the current state of patch compliance across your organization, showing the percentage of endpoints needing critical updates, new updates needing approval, and pending reboots required to complete patching – all with drill down to the actual endpoints and updates.
- Granular update deployment policies to control the update sources, types, and security severities, as well as include or exclude certain updates by name or vendor wildcards. This allows configuring your patching policies to be as specific as your organization requires. To deploy all or select patches matching specified criteria – for example:
- Include or exclude security updates by severity, such as deploying critical updates sooner than lower-severity updates;
- Deploy Windows Defender definition updates multiple times per day, separate from running all other update policies;
- Include or exclude drivers/firmware updates, Windows feature updates, non-critical updates, and more;
- Selectively deploy only third-party software patches, mandatory or optional OS updates, or any three types in combination;
- Automatically or manually approve and deploy new updates based on specified filters;
- Automatic criteria-based update approval after a specified number of days to avoid approval of untested updates too soon;
- Customizable reboot options based on update type or security severity, such as requiring a shorter time frame for critical updates and more relaxed for non-critical.
- Extended Endpoint Details View that shows the installed applications, missing updates, and the hardware information individually for each endpoint in one customizable single pane of glass view. The per-endpoint information includes:
- Installed applications: name, vendor, version, update status;
- Missing Windows and third-party updates;
- OS type and version, reboot status, customizable computer name and comment, user name;
- Hardware information: manufacturer and serial number, MAC address, disk, memory, CPU, network adapter;
- The ability to customize view columns is coming in the next release.
- Switchable UI dark mode.
- Redesigned Update Approval view:
- Grouping of missing third-party updates by application, showing only the latest available version by default;
- Additional update details: KB number, CVE, reboot requirement, update size, optional or recommended.
- Scheduled patch compliance report to simplify tracking of your patch compliance status on a regular basis.
- Improved reliability of agent operations:
- Automatic repair of Windows Update Agent (self-healing) whenever the Windows update database becomes corrupted;
- Agent installation via Group Policy Software Installation is now fully supported in addition to using GPO startup scripts
Moreover, Action1 Platform is also filled with over 400 other miscellaneous improvements, including:
- Redesigned compact view layouts to show more lines of data on one screen;
- The ability to rename Action1 enterprise;
- The ability to delete custom data sources;
- Self-explaining UI elements to simplify new user onboarding;
- Customizable Action1 console session timeout (default is 30 minutes);
- Improved policy execution progress reporting;
- One common policy concept instead of two confusing entities (actions and policies);
- Showing endpoint groups assigned to a policy without editing the policy;
- The ability to disable the remote access feature for an endpoint group, an organization, or the entire enterprise
Don’t wait, create an account to streamline the entire patch management process with Action1, from identifying missing updates to compliance reporting, across both Windows OS and third-party software. The first 100 endpoints are free with no functionality limitations.
