How To Manage Vendor Updates in BeamON

How To Manage Vendor Updates in BeamON

Across your technology infrastructure there are thousands of unique pieces of hardware and software which must be kept up to date with the latest security patches, firmware updates and software versions. The challenge is that there is not a common place to find all the relevant updates for the devices and software within your environment, particularly for on-premise deployments.

Each vendor you work with likely has an email list or a portal where you can register your equipment, but since there are likely hundreds of different vendors across your infrastructure it is unsustainable to manually stay up to date on new releases across these vendor portals. Even if you do have access to all the portals and email lists from vendors, the second challenge is confirming that an update is actually applicable to the exact hardware model number or software version you are running. This requires your internal asset management system to be in perfect condition, which it rarely is.

Thus, it is inevitable that security patches and FW/SW updates will fall through the cracks and not get deployed which puts your organization at an increased risk of costly downtime or a critical security breach.

This is a growing problem as production workflows become increasingly complex with more vendors and sophisticated interoperability between devices that often require each device to be on a certain version of software to work as intended. The management of these devices is becoming unsustainable for engineers on site who need to stay up to date on updates from hundreds of vendors. 

Monitoring Updates

In order to solve this growing problem, we must be able to actively monitor updates from thousands of vendors as well as ensure that those updates relate to what we own and use within our production workflow. BEAM’s update module has done just that. First, we actively monitor and query vendors for all new firmware, software and security patches. We organize and normalize updates from over 6,000 vendors into a common database. Then, using our product matching algorithm, we identify the exact model number or software version for your asset which allows us to then link all relevant updates related to the assets you own within the BEAM updates module. Upon logging into the updates module you will be presented with all relevant updates related to the assets that you own and as new updates are pushed from vendors they will be displayed in this module. 

Example update in BeamON Platform for Sony PXW camera
BeamON update links to the original vendor update on Sony's website

Why Using Updates

Here are the 5 key benefits of viewing an update in BEAM:

  • Updates are standardized across all vendors, they are presented in the same format for easy viewability regardless of the vendor or the type of update. 
  • BEAM links you directly back to where the update resides on the vendor website, ensuring that you get straight to the source to download relevant files. 
  • See all assets across in your inventory that are affected by the update, as well as their location, workflow and user. 
  • Quickly see which key workflows this update will affect to ensure that instituting an update will not affect other critical systems. 
  • Prioritize updates based on severity on your systems and assign them for a team member to be complete. 

Do you have any questions about Beam's Enterprise Asset Management solution? Please contacts us here.