Patch management company, Shavlik, has launched its Shavlik Protect product on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Shavlik Protect is security software that automates the discovery of missing patches and deploys them to PCs and servers across a network.
Shavlik said it improves the security posture of devices throughout an organisation, and protects against security breaches through more proactive vulnerability management.
The latest offering enables users to install the full version of Shavlik Protect in Microsoft’s Cloud computing platform. It extends Shavlik’s patch management capabilities to the Cloud and includes agent and agent-less management options.
The product also includes support for OS and third-party patching for both physical and virtual server instances.
Shavlik vice president engineering, Rob Juncker said the company was thrilled to be part of the Azure community.
“We’ve always been able to handle the needs of our customers in securing on-premise servers, but this offering extends our capabilities into Azure, making it easier for our customers to manage the patches on their Azure servers,” he said.
Started in 1993 by former Microsoft employee, Mark Shavlik, the company developed a patch management automation system at a time when individual devices on a network had to be patched manually via floppy disks.
When dealing with hundreds if not thousands of devices this manual form of patching was made near impossible.
Shavlik technology allowed IT departments to interrogate an entire network from a single location and determine which devices on the network needed patching. With this management tool, multiple devices were able to be patched at once with the click of a button.
Due to its lineage, Shavlik now conducts beta testing for Microsoft patches. It has a team that actively searches for vulnerabilities in Microsoft, Adobe, Java and other commonly used applications.
The business was acquired by VMware in 2011. It then operated as a business unit within VMware, but at that time, had little direction.
Shavlik distribution manager, David Eike, described the VMware period.
“It was a great company but we were lost,” he said.
“We made great technology but we were a very small part of a very large business. In that situation, you sometimes get lost.”
In 2013, VMware made a decision to divest and let go of a number of small businesses, Shavlik was one of these.
Eike said that VMware wanted to focus on the parts of its business that generated billions of dollars as opposed to millions and this was the motivation for the sale.
When VMware was initially looking to acquire Shavlik, LANDESK had also been in the picture. The subsequent two years that Shavlik was a VMware business had done nothing to quell LANDESK’s desire to acquire the company’s assets and so it jumped at the chance to acquire the business.
LANDESK then stood Shavlik back up as a stand-alone business.
“It was the best thing that ever could have happened to us,” said Eike.
“The reason LANDESK bought us is the same reason VMware did, we are the best in the world at patch management.
Following the acquisition, both LANDESK and Shavlik had separate channel businesses.
“We had a channel team that was LANDESK oriented and focussed and a Shavlik team, but we were calling on the same customers,” Eike said.
“In the last year we decided to unify that under a geographic model where we had regional leaders responsible for both companies.”
Eike explained that some of the largest organisations in the US that had breach issues have come to Shavlik because they identified patch management as a chink in the armour.
He said that there was a huge opportunity for partners in Australia to offer the solution to large organisations to fix a simple but very important issue that leaves companies extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks.
