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Tuesday: March 8, 2005 |
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Ecora Corporation Ecora Turns Widely Popular Free Patch Tool into Breakthrough Solution: Ecora Patch Manager With the most intuitive user interface in the industry, Ecora Patch Manager enables organizations to break the bottleneck in enterprise patch management PORTSMOUTH, NH — January 8, 2003 – Ecora Software, the leader in IT risk management software, today announced the immediate availability of Ecora Patch Manager, an advanced solution for enterprise patch analysis and remediation. Patch management is the hottest issue facing IT departments today for one simple reason: most security breaches and vulnerabilities can be prevented through proactive patch management. Ecora’s free patch management tool released last year quickly created a user community of over 5,000 organizations. Ecora leveraged this network, combining customer feedback with leading-edge technology, to build a solution that will drive patch management tools to new standards of simplicity, breadth, and extensibility. Ecora Patch Manager automatically discovers, analyzes, and deploys security patches critical to workstations and servers right from an administrator’s desktop and offers patch coverage for the most popular Microsoft products, including Windows NT/2000/XP, Internet Explorer, Exchange, IIS, Media Player, Office, Outlook, and SQL Sever. Cross-platform support (starting with Unix and Novell) is due later this year. The need for this solution is overwhelming. Gartner estimates that IT managers now spend up to two hours each day managing patches. “The number of patches released makes it almost imperative to employ automated solutions to keep patch levels current,” said Ronni Colville, research analyst at Gartner. The reason most companies have fallen behind in patch management is the inherent complexity of the patching process. Commercial solutions to this point have been difficult to learn and inadequate in streamlining the analysis, acquisition, and deployment of patches throughout an infrastructure. “We have simplified the process of patch analysis and remediation by creating a product that requires zero training,” says Ecora founder and CEO Alex Bakman. “Anyone who has avoided patching their environment because of hard-to-use tools and the complexity of the task can download Patch Manager and fortify their environment in a few hours.” Ecora Patch Manager eliminates time spent researching patches by auto-discovering patch levels, alerting administrators, and linking them to the latest service packs, hotfixes, and relevant vendor resources. Installation—either immediate or scheduled— pushes patches out to servers and workstations automatically, eliminating the time and resource drain of manually updating individual machines. What customers like most about Ecora is its ease of use: patch data for all systems is accessible from intuitive tab-based views organized by host, application, or patch, making it easy to get a quick snapshot of what needs to be resolved in the environment. “When you have a mix of operating systems in your environment, like NT4 and Windows 2000 and XP, trying to keep track of all the patches they write daily for these things is a nightmare,” says Dennis Rios, IT director for The Washington Home, which operates long-term care facilities in three states. “The reason Ecora Patch Manager is so valuable is that it can do a scan of all my servers in about 15 minutes. It takes me that long just to find out what patches are available. This product goes out and does it, finds them for every server, tells me what I need to download, downloads it, applies it, and reboots my servers. You can’t ask for anything better.” “We just don’t have the time to run around patching machines every single day,” says Wendy Williams, Network Administrator for Koss-Olinger Financial Group (Gainesville, Fla.) “With Ecora Patch Manager, we can just run it and set it to update everybody and we know that it gets done. Patch Manager gives me a lot more time to work on more important projects. It gives us a live return on our investment as well as peace of mind.” Ecora Patch Manager Features & Benefits: • Automated Patch Deployment: Patch Manager deploys service packs and hotfixes interactively or on a scheduled basis • Grouping: User-defined grouping of servers and workstations facilitates analysis or installation by department, machine type, or time zone • Alerting: Set triggers for automatic notification on new patch database availability, success or failure of patch deployments, or other conditions • Auto-Updates: Patch Manager dynamically updates the patch database to include the most recent updates and hotfixes before analysis is performed Patch Manager’s intuitive interface will support a host of new features and functionality in future versions, according to Bakman. “The next iteration of Patch Manager, due out in mid 2003, will further automate the analysis and distribution of patches by having the product automatically learn the needs of specific environments, and increase support for mission-critical platforms and all applications,” Bakman said. Patch Manager is sold via subscription on a per-node basis with volume and multi-year discounts available. Pricing starts at $500. Please visit www.ecora.com to download a free 15-day evaluation copy for up to 25 machines. About Ecora Software: Ecora provides risk management software to automatically document, analyze, and fortify your IT infrastructure. Ecora’s cost-effective solutions enhance efficiency associated with IT compliance, business continuity, and vulnerability assessment while providing the means to monitor change and plan for recovery. Ecora supports enterprise platforms from Cisco Systems, IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. Novell is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems. Solaris is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Microsoft, MS-SQL, and Windows NT are registered trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Lotus and Domino are trademarks of Lotus Corporation. Ecora is a registered trademark of Ecora Software Corporation. Contact: Andrew Leibs Ecora Software 603.334.3144 [email protected] |