Customers looking to automate the repetitive and tedious processes of updating security patches, rolling out new applications and simply managing desktops might want to consider LANDesk's offering due out later this year.

LANDesk last week announced patch management software designed to work with the company's LANDesk Management Suite, now in Version 7. LANDesk's Management Suite, which includes asset, inventory and configuration management applications, runs on Windows servers and clients. Network managers administer the patch features either through a Web browser or a Windows interface.

The patch management software can help customers automate vulnerability assessments, patch downloads and software distributions. With more than 4,000 known vulnerabilities and more cropping up daily, managing patches has become a burden on many IT staffs.

Denny Cannon, PC integration specialist at Farm Credit Services of America in Omaha, Neb., says he will deploy the patch management add-on, scheduled for general availability in October, to help alleviate the manual work involved in managing patches on his network. He says with a team of five staffers currently working with a manual risk assessment, he hopes the software will more quickly assess where he needs to apply patches and more effectively secure his network.

"It will help with keeping our systems up-to-date more efficiently, by automatically downloading the patches we need for the systems we specify," Cannon says.

With this product, the company says administrators will be able to configure LANDesk Management Suite to track patches for specific applications. The LANDesk Software security management product automatically will monitor industry-standard vulnerability databases such as ICAT, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun and SUS. When a new patch is detected, it will be retrieved automatically and packaged for automated, targeted distribution across the network.

Click to see: Money pit

LANDesk Management Suite consists of server software and distributed agents. The agents on managed devices collect data that will inform the patch-management application if they need to be patched or updated. The software also includes a rollback feature, which lets network managers de-install a patch if an error occurs and restore the machine to its last good state. The software also tests the patch before rolling it out across a company and then performs a follow-up audit to ensure the patch has been deployed properly, the company says.