Better Together: Closing Patch Management Gaps with Action1

Great strides have been made in evolving patch management from a reactive, ad hoc practice to a consistent, streamlined and automated IT process that can easily be scaled.

Yet the environments modern enterprises operate in are far more complex than they were just five years ago. This is due in large part to the introduction of remote and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, as well as cloud computing and a new generation of evolving security threats.

What’s more, many of the deployment tools businesses use for updates and patching simply weren’t designed to operate in these conditions. Tools such as Microsoft Intune and other Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) platforms have helped to bring consistency to patching and deployment processes, yet IT teams are still left with pressing questions post-deployment that these solutions aren’t able to answer:

• Did the patch install successfully?
• What about third-party applications?
• Are any devices still vulnerable?

Modern IT environments can be riddled with blind spots, making it challenging for teams to get the answers they need. This forces them to act on assumptions or incomplete data, and without certainty on these points, how can teams know if a patch deployment was actually a success?

In this article, we’ll explore how Action1 can act as the ideal complement to UEM solutions like Microsoft Intune, and how using these tools together can bring greater clarity and control to the patch management process.

What Action1 adds

Action1 is a cloud-native patch management and vulnerability platform, with a focus on delivering security, compliance and automation within hybrid and remote working environments.

This tool is the perfect complement to UEM solutions like Intune. Action1 plugs the gaps in these tools’ capabilities, so together they can deliver businesses the visibility and control they need across all the devices in their network.

Here’s how:

Autonomous OS and third-party patching

While the majority of Windows applications can be accounted for, third-party applications as innocuous as Google Chrome, Adobe Acrobat and even Zoom can slip through the radar of standard UEM platforms.

Unless they’re set to update automatically, patches for these apps may not be applied at all – leaving them outdated and potentially vulnerable. In these cases, it's up to IT teams to manually identify and address unpatched software. During that time, they represent potential compliance risks and security gaps for the business.

Everyday applications like these are among the highest risk. Our Software Vulnerability Ratings Report revealed that Google Chrome alone saw a 1840% increase in exploited vulnerabilities between 2023 and 2024.

Action1 offers automated patching for third-party applications like Chrome. This helps teams seamlessly update key business apps outside of the Microsoft suite, removing the need for manual packaging or custom scripts.

Through these automated processes, time-stretched IT teams can refocus on strategic priorities, while business leaders can take comfort in knowing the risk of human error has been dramatically reduced.

Vulnerability prioritization

Action1 can enhance and enrich the vulnerability assessment capabilities of tools like Microsoft Intune, helping teams to prioritize and focus on significant threats. This is possible through:

• Strengthening Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) visibility with exploitability, asset value and threat intelligence
• Ingesting external scanner data (from Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7, etc.) to identify and patch the most urgent risks first, alongside data from Microsoft Defender and other sources
• Enriching severity-based risk scoring with Known Exploited Variables Catalog (KEV) status, ransomware links and asset criticality

Working alongside UEM platforms, Action1 gives businesses faster time-to-remediation, broader patch coverage and improved vulnerability prioritization. This can help teams deal with the big-ticket items first, and make decisions based on intelligence and data, not on guesswork.

Real-time visibility

Flexible work practices and cloud computing have expanded the typical organization’s array of work devices – and with it, their attack surface area. Many of these endpoints are either personal devices used under BYOD policies or are only intermittently connected to the corporate VPN, making them harder to monitor and secure.

In this environment, obtaining true oversight of all devices and their security and compliance status is a near-impossible task using a UEM platform alone.

Action1 can strengthen a team’s visibility into which devices have been fully patched, which pushes failed, and which endpoints are still exposed – even those that are offline, off-VPN, or intermittently connected.  

Through the use of lightweight agents that remain active even when devices are switched off, Action1 brings the level of visibility IT teams need to move from “patch sent” to “patch confirmed” at scale and truly verify the success of patch management beyond deployment.

Built for hybrid, distributed environments

As a cloud-native, agent-based platform, Action1 is ideal for the hybrid, distributed technology environments enterprises operate in.

Having no infrastructure to manage means:

• Rapid deployment without any hardware dependencies or limitations
• No expensive on-premises servers to monitor (and subsequently no overheads)
• Higher fault tolerance and availability, with no bottlenecks or single source of failure
• Greater scalability as your business grows, allowing you to patch and manage endpoints anywhere – even if they’re not connected or outside of a network firewall

Action1 also isn’t dependent on VPN to function – unlike some UEM platforms, its lightweight agents communicate over standard ports (such as SSL 443 and TCP 22543), allowing it to bypass VPNs and corporate network dependencies and monitor devices across home networks, public Wi-Fi, and mobile hotspots.

These factors make Action1 particularly suitable for:

• Organizations with a large number of hybrid and remote workers
• Global organizations operating in different regions
• Teams managing large estates with limited internal headcount
• Environments that include Windows Server (not currently covered by platforms like Intune)
• IT teams leveraging Microsoft licensing

Easy to integrate, easy to maintain

Action1 is specifically designed for seamless integration and low-maintenance operation. It takes just five minutes per device to set up, and with built-in remote and software deployment capabilities, you won’t need to install added remote management and monitoring (RMM) tools.

Here are several other ways Action1 is easy to integrate and maintain, lifting the burden on time-stretched IT teams:

Action1 runs in parallel with existing UEM solutions

Onboarding new tools alongside your existing tech stack can introduce challenges – from wasted spend on overlapping features to persistent blind spots and conflicting reports.

Rather than simply mirroring or even disrupting what IT teams already in place, Action1 is designed to run alongside tools like Intune by specifically focusing on operational execution rather than policy enforcement.

Action1’s dashboard reporting also supplements UEM compliance views rather than replacing them. These differences allow both platforms to coexist and complement one another.

Action1 focuses on user experience

Action1 just works: it doesn’t require retraining for IT teams. With an intuitive user interface designed for simplicity and clarity, teams familiar with platforms like Microsoft Intune won’t face a steep learning curve getting to grips with how Action1 works. This will make it easy to secure buy-in among time-stretched IT teams who may be reluctant to learn a new tool or complicate their existing tech stack.

Action1 is also purposefully built around familiar workflows that conform to standard IT practices, enabling teams to keep existing patching processes intact while gaining the clarity and responsiveness they’ve been missing.

There’s no need for complex reconfiguration of infrastructure changes

Action1 agents can be deployed directly via the admin center of your existing UEM solution, meaning there’s no need for complex, time-consuming reconfiguration or third-party tools to get it set up.

Rewriting existing compliance or configuration policies also isn’t necessary, as Action1 operates independently. In terms of infrastructure, Action1 removes the need for on-premises investment as a cloud-native tool.

UEM + Action1 = patch management success

If a business is concerned about the vulnerabilities presented by blind spots outside of a UEM platform’s visibility, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel or throw out what already works.

Action1 helps teams get more out of their existing investment in patch management – delivering the visibility, prioritization, and control needed to maintain a strong security posture in complex, modern environments.

With its user-focused design, streamlined deployment, and emphasis on operational execution, Action1 isn’t just one more tool for IT teams to navigate, nor is it a costly addition with overlapping features.

When paired with a UEM platform such as Microsoft Intune, Action1 helps create a more cohesive, cloud-native endpoint management strategy – one that balances control, automation, and security. This combination moves patch management beyond deployment and into validation – finally giving IT teams a clearer view of what success really looks like.