Kandji today added vulnerability management capabilities to its endpoint and security management platform for Apple systems and devices.
Weldon Dodd, senior vice president for global partnerships for Kandji, said the Kandji Vulnerability Management module will enable IT teams to further centralize the management of IT operations and cybersecurity.
Increasingly, IT teams are automating patch management to ensure known vulnerabilities are remediated before being exploited by cybercriminals. While it’s possible automatically applying a patch might disrupt availability of an application, the risks now associated with a cybersecurity breach are now greater than cost of downtime resulting from an application not being available, notes Dodd.
In general, a patch can be rolled back to bring an application back online, while a cyberattack involving, for example, ransomware could paralyze an entire organization for days and weeks. More organizations are realizing the most proactive cybersecurity measures they can put in place is to ensure the latest most secure version of software has been deployed in their IT environments, said Dodd.
The Kandji Vulnerability Management provides real-time insights and remediation advice for hundreds of business applications and multiple versions of the macOS operating system to help organizations reduce the amount of time it currently takes for them to remediate a vulnerability, he added.
Kandji originally developed a mobile device management (MDM) platform based on agent software that has been extended into the realm of cybersecurity using the Apple Endpoint Security framework to detect changes to software. In addition to the Vulnerability Management offering, the company’s suite of tools also now includes a previously launched endpoint detection and response (EDR) offering.
It’s not clear to what degree IT service management (ITSM) teams are assuming responsibility for security operations. In many larger firms, some IT teams even now report to a CISO rather than to a CIO. In smaller organizations, there are not enough resources available to fund a separate cybersecurity team, so responsibility falls to the internal IT operations team.
Regardless of who is responsible for cybersecurity, the volume and sophistication of the cyberattacks being launched only continues to grow. While Apple platforms were once considered relatively secure, it’s been shown they are largely vulnerable to the same type of cyberattacks as any other platform. The increased number of Apple platforms being used in corporate environments has only served to make them a more attractive target.
Less clear is the degree to which IT teams are relying on ITSM platforms that are designed specifically for Apple devices and systems versus employing an ITSM platform that supports multiple platforms. The latter approach tends to reduce costs, but providers of IT management platforms such as Kanji contend that an approach designed to run natively on Apple devices and systems will ultimately ensure a better end user experience. In other instances, some organizations are completely standardized on Apple devices and systems, so there is only one ITSM option.
The one thing that is certain is Apple devices and systems are here to stay, so the only thing left to resolve now is how best to manage what has now, in many organizations, become a fleet of them.
