Effortless Patching Across Platforms, Powered by Metadata
With Aviral Sangal, Director for Metadata Engineering and Automation, Adaptiva
In Part 1, What’s the Secret Sauce Behind Autonomous Patching? (Hint: It’s the Metadata) we explored how metadata powers Adaptiva’s autonomous patching. Now in Part 2, Aviral Sangal reveals how his team’s work supports reliable, hands-free patching even in the most complicated deployment scenarios, including cross-platform patching and delta updates.
Adaptiva’s metadata team adds nearly a hundred new patches to the Patch Library daily, each one vetted and coded with detailed metadata. Why? Adaptiva customers know the answer better than anyone. Metadata is behind the hands-free patching experience they rely on to deploy patches seamlessly across a complicated multi-platform enterprise environment.
Let’s take a closer look at Adaptiva’s metadata-enabled patching experience.
Set it and forget it: Seamless patching for the whole enterprise environment
Patching can only be autonomous if it can accommodate complex scenarios and adapt to changing conditions as they arise. Adaptiva’s patching solution achieves this through its customization engine.
OneSite Patch features an easy-to-use, no-code interface to help IT teams set strategies once and let the system do the rest. The system applies these strategies consistently across the business environment through pre-defined classifications. You can customize the testing parameters, deployment phases, approvals, notifications, schedules, reboot rules, and more. These rules may be applied on the basis of specific applications, endpoints, or business units.
This level of customization allows IT teams to “set it and forget it,” trusting the system to deploy patches across their entire environment and adapt as needed in response to changing network and risk conditions. The IT team stays in control with a real-time dashboard displaying status across platforms, with flexible controls for manual intervention if needed.
To achieve this seamless experience, Adaptiva’s autonomous technology navigates even the most complicated deployment scenarios, including:
Cross-platform support for Windows, Mac, and Linux
Adaptiva stands out by supporting a single patching strategy across all platforms. “The customer can have their critical products in a single patching strategy and that patching strategy can include products across different platforms,” explains Aviral Sangal. For example, a customer might have Chrome for Windows, Chrome for MacOS, and Chrome for Linux. With Adaptiva, they can all be patched simultaneously. As Sangal says, “It becomes very easy and intuitive for the customer to deploy the patches across platforms without managing different products to deploy patches on different platforms.” Other patching solutions may support multiple platforms but still require the user to manage each platform separately, with different strategies and different conditions. With Adaptiva, you can have one set of conditions for all platforms.
The metadata connection: How does Adaptiva deliver consistency and patching across these platforms?
Sangal explains, “Adaptiva’s consistency comes from the rigorous QA validation applied to every patch application we release. That maintains the resilience and quality for our customers.”
Unlike other solutions that offer one-size-fits-all libraries, Adaptiva processes, packages, and tests every third-party patch. That means there are no manual processes to find, extract, repackage, and test patch metadata. Each patch is pre-processed for deployment to the appropriate platform with consistent customization codes applied, so the IT team doesn’t need to apply the strategy three times for three platforms.
Fully integrated support for Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 presents a unique challenge to a unified, hands-free patching experience because it supports delta updates, small partial updates delivered through a click-to-run Microsoft client. Without automation, this is a time-consuming process. Every time there is a new update, the customer must download the whole content (3 GB per language in the context of Microsoft 365) and manually generate blobs to break up the data into chunks that are then streamed to the endpoint.
OneSite Patch streamlines this cumbersome process with intelligent automation capable of distinguishing and routing the appropriate delta update to the endpoint. Sangal explains, “With Microsoft 365 updates support in OneSite Patch, the user does not need to generate blobs or download the whole content. The system is intelligent enough to identify which ByteRanges are required by the delta update and only those gets streamed to the endpoint.”
The metadata connection: How does OneSite detect what is needed by the endpoint and only serve those bytes? It’s the metadata. Metadata identifies, isolates, and deploys the specific bytes needed to update a particular endpoint.
The OneSite Platform continuously delivers the necessary software and patches to devices across the organization, wherever they are. Schedule a demo to see how OneSite navigates typical deployment roadblocks for a hands-free autonomous patching experience with full visibility and control.
