0patch Central: We are Now Ready to Micropatch Your Enterprise

0patch Central, our central management solution, is now ready to accept first users 

 

by Stanka Salamun, the 0patch Team

At 0patch, we are on the mission to make your security patching virtually imperceptible:

• We patch your most critical 0days.
• We buy you time by protecting you with micropatches while you test official vendor updates.
• We secure your unsupported products after they lose their vendors' support (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008).

We do it in the most convenient way you've ever experienced: you don't need to reboot computers or restart applications, you can switch off a potentially problematic patch (and later switch it on again), our micropatches are so tiny that most could be published in a single tweet. They are delivered and applied within an hour of their publication, without any activity on user's or administrator's part. Needless to say, we don't tinker with functionality of your applications: we don't change, add or remove anything (unless it's vulnerable and we can't repair it any other way).

  
But one of the most common questions we've been receiving from our users lately was: when will your remote central management be ready for enterprises? We are excited to inform you that 0patch Central, our cloud-based enterprise management solution, is now ready to accept first users, and you're invited!

This is a big thing for us, and for all enterprise users asking for central management of their 0patch Agents. If you have a non-trivial fleet of Windows computers to protect with our micropatches, 0patch Central is your central management solution.

What can you do with 0patch Agents remotely?

• You can make them completely silent for end users.
• You can organize them into groups and subgroups.
• You can move them between groups (which will change their patching policy to the destination group's).
• You can enable or disable them.
• You can update them to the latest version.
• You can delete them. (But no worries, you can also bring them back.)
• For each group you can define patches that are enabled or disabled. You can even do that for individual computers, remotely. 

And how do you set up patching policy in 0patch Central? 

0patch Central - "All Computers" group

 

Let's look at two frequent scenarios:


Scenario 1: The traditional enterprise "Test in a small group before deployment" setup

1) Open the root All Computers group, open the Settings tab, and set Default state for new patches to "Disabled" - this will result in all newly arrived patches being disabled on all computers in this group.

2) Create a subgroup called Testing, open its Settings tab, and set Default state for new patches to "Enabled" - this will result in all newly arrived patches being enabled on all computers in trhis group.

3) Select and move your testing machines from the All Computers group to the Testing group - these computers will get all newly downloaded patches immediately applied.

4) When you decide that some patch has been sufficiently tested on computers in the Testing group for network-wide deployment, open the All Computers group, Patches tab, locate the patch and set it to "Enabled"


Scenario 2: The "I don't have time for this, just micropatch my 0days immediately" setup

1) Open the root All Computers group, open the Settings tab, and set Default state for new patches to "Enabled" - this will result in all newly arrived patches being immediately enabled on all computers.




You'll find 0patch Central at address https://central.0patch.com, where you can login with your existing 0patch credentials, or register a new account. In case you don't have a 0patch account yet, just register a new account at https://central.0patch.com/auth/register. When you have your 0patch account ready, let us know at support@0patch.com which email address you used so we can issue some trial PRO licenses and turn on the "Enterprise" switch for you. This will allow you to access all Enterprise features such as organizing agents into groups and setting patching policy for each individual group.

If you apply for your Enterprise trial while we are still in "Early Access" you will get your 0patch Enterprise licenses for the price of 0patch PRO for your first yearly subscription. But do not wait too long as we are closing "Early Access" just before Q2 2020 starts.


Important! Remote management only works with our just-released 0patch Agent version (19.11.15.10650) so while you will be able to see your older agents in 0patch Central, you won't be able to do anything with them. To resolve this, please manually update all existing agents to the latest version and make sure to only use the latest agent version for all future installs. All subsequent agent updates will from then on be manageable from 0patch Central.

We tried to design 0patch Central intuitively and with minimal complexity, and hope you won't be needing much help using it. But we're not fooling ourselves. You'll surely have questions and we're anxiously waiting for you at support@0patch.com. Don't hesitate to ask or suggest anything as we want to make 0patch Central a tool that will make your patching life as easy as possible. If something is not obvious to you, it's probably not obvious to others as well, so do let us know about it.



We had to focus on enterprise features first, but next items on our to-do list will be to make life much easier for MSPs and VARs.

Welcome to 0patch Central, we hope it'll serve you well and become your effective little patching assistant!