Pulseway’s new Custom Third Party Software Patching lets MSPs partners get same day patch management capability for software that is not in Pulseway’s library of supported titles.
Marius Mihalec, CEO and Founder of Pulseway
Today, Mobile-first RMM [Remote Monitoring and Management] provider Pulseway is enhancing the third party software management capability it introduced last year. It builds on its Third Party Management Engine with new Custom Third Party Software Patching, which allows MSP partners to quickly get customized patch management for titles which Pulseway does not yet support.
“2019 has been a fantastic year for us in terms of both product innovation and customer satisfaction,” said Marius Mihalec, CEO and Founder of Pulseway. “Like all our enhancements, this one reacts to what our customers have been asking us for.”
Pulseway initially introduced its Third Party Patch Management module last April to keep external software up to date and plug potential vulnerabilities. It combined with Pulseway’s initial OS patch management module to ensure that all systems receive the security of real-time patching. Out of the gate it supported 18 software titles.
“It is a home-grown third-party patching engine, which now has 63 titles supported,” Mihalec said. “It reflects the fact that security is critical today, and that making sure you patch all aspects of the operating system is critical for our customer base. Before we introduced this, some of them used scripts and some third-party tools. Introducing it required a commitment of resources which we were able to make last year.
“We started with ones that were widely used mainstream applications which impacted the business, like Java Run Time environment, Adobe Flash and Acrobat, Google Chrome and TeamViewer,” Mihalec added. “We have continued to expand that with all the Office applications, and with Slack, Zoom and other communications tools. We are continuing to expand our standard catalogue of titles, and every week or so we add new ones.”
That still leaves an enormous number of software titles which are not supported. The Custom Third Party Software Titles Patching is designed to let MSPs secure this patching capability for software titles that are applicable to their specific IT environments.
“This can be used for specific applications that they built themselves, or which was provided to them by a third-party provider, but which may not be of interest to entire customer base,” Mihalec said. “A CAD application would be a good example.”
Custom Third Party Software Patching works by having the Pulseway user add a URL to the application installer of their custom title and add some rule definitions. The third party application will then be added to the list for patching automation.
“It’s very simple,” Mihalec said. “We will process it all behind the scenes automatically. There is some manual monitoring on our end, but most of the process is pretty much automatic, allowing us to reach out in an automatic manner, get the installation package, prepare it and roll it out. We can get a request rolled out the same day.”
Coincidental with the custom patching update, Pulseway is also announcing another new patching capability.
“We have introduced the ability to define patching policies at the customer or site level,” Mihalec indicated. “All those policies also kick in automatically.”
