Novell ZENworks Patch Management

Policy Monitoring and Enforcement

The main goal of patch management is to ensure that security patches have been assigned to and installed on the correct computers, according to your organization's policies. With ZENworks® Patch Management, you can quickly and easily assign patches to devices or groups through a ZENworks Patch Management wizard. These wizards guide you easily through all the powerful options available in the assignment, distribution and installation process. Once assigned, the patches are delivered to the managed device via the ZENworks bundle delivery mechanism, leveraging all the transport design and optimization options available in ZENworks Configuration Management. ZENworks Patch Management monitors these assignments and reports on the successes and/or failures of installations as well as other problems that arise during the process. Patch monitoring delivers easily viewable, real-time results on the main "Vulnerabilities" tab.

You can also utilize the ZENworks Patch Management mandatory baseline capability to establish and enforce patch management policy. For example, you can assign specific patches to be continually monitored and enforced on all devices in the group. Security events, such as the removal of a mandatory patch, the patch being compromised or reimaging of the device, may cause a device to deviate from patch policy and require reinstallation. Mandatory baseline enforcement automatically addresses issues like these without requiring administrative intervention. Mandatory baseline deployments can be created any time you want to kick off an analysis on your monitored devices.

The security patch monitoring and policy mechanisms available in ZENworks Patch Management present significant cost savings and accuracy over manual patch monitoring processes. These innovations, along with automated enforcement capabilities, provide your organization with a higher level of network security than you may have been able to cost-effectively achieve using other methods.