Eliminate Patching Complexity with Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations

Organizations face rapidly expanding attack surfaces and evolving cyber threats, yet most breaches and disruptions exploit vulnerabilities in which known patches have not yet been applied. Current patch management lifecycles are characterized by increasing complexity, a dynamic threat landscape, regulatory pressures, and manual processes. Businesses need an effective patch management strategy to know what to patch, when to patch, and the ability to plan and automate through proper change control processes.

Until recently, patch management has been a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process, taking place across various teams, tools, and platforms that are isolated from the configuration management database (CMDB) and service desk. Now, Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations offers a better way forward, with end-to-end patch management seamlessly integrated into the ServiceNow platform. This integration allows organizations to proactively identify and prioritize patches, as well as automate deployments, boosting efficiency and compliance.

Read on to learn why companies must evolve patch management strategies and why Tanium’s latest ServiceNow integration is a game-changer for global organizations.

Common patch orchestration challenges

Patch management is highly fragmented, relying on IT teams facing significant challenges related to visibility, resource constraints, and disparate tools for compatibility scanning, deployments, and reporting.

Making matters worse, these tools are typically resource-intensive and limited in scope, requiring dozens or hundreds of staging servers yet failing to deliver comprehensive visibility across all endpoints and networks. This contributes to high overhead and numerous points of failure while also making it harder to scale and providing insufficient patch coverage.

Here are some of the top challenges companies encounter with patch management:

• Limited visibility into IT assets and their dependencies reduces the ability to effectively identify and prioritize patches across the organization. 
• Manual workflows force overburdened IT teams to spend time on tasks such as identifying vulnerabilities, testing patches, and validating deployments across different environments. According to Infosec Institute, patching a vulnerability in most organizations takes between 60 and 150 days.
• Fragmented and disconnected tools require manual change controls across uncoordinated teams, leading to duplication of efforts and increased failure rates.
• Operational disruptions caused by network constraints, incompatible patch deployments, and lack of visibility into service dependencies lead to unplanned downtime.

As mentioned above, patch deployments also typically leverage tools and platforms that are disconnected from the CMDB and service desk, requiring manual change control and leading to inaccurate data. Patch planning from external systems can also miss critical dependencies and historical data, leading to increased failure rates and negative financial and productivity impacts.

The solution: Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations

Tanium is a proud partner of ServiceNow, a leading AI-driven workflow automation platform. By combining real-time endpoint data with IT security and operations workflows, Tanium and ServiceNow provide 100% asset visibility, stronger end-user experiences, and enhanced security.

Tanium’s latest ServiceNow integration, Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations, streamlines global patch management by eliminating manual workflows. This AI-powered integration uniquely integrates with ServiceNow to deliver comprehensive, real-time patch information correlated with CI service desk history and CMDB relationships.

Furthermore, with Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations, organizations can access a unified interface with instant access to related service desk and configuration item data. This integration reduces complexity, improves control, ensures audit and entitlement compliance, and increases operational resilience.

With Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations, IT teams can:

• Proactively scan for and identify all applicable patches for Windows, Mac, and Linux configuration items in the CMDB
• Prioritize patches based on service desk history, CMDB attributes, and dependency relationships
• Automate patch deployments from change management workflows and approvals
• Leverage native ServiceNow reporting and dashboard capabilities for patch history, deployments, and outstanding risk

Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations enables next-generation patch orchestration, helping organizations protect complex, distributed environments with the speed and precision they need.

By using Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations, organizations can instantly understand patch applicability and level of business risk through real-time data tied to configuration items in the CMDB. Plus, Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations significantly reduces manual efforts and increases patch efficacy through drag-and-drop patch requests and workflow automation tied to change records.

Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations consolidates legacy patching tools, reduces licensing, maintenance, and support costs, and improves overall patch coverage while enhancing operational resilience and business continuity.

Learn more about Tanium’s ongoing partnership with ServiceNow at our Partner Spotlight page.