How can I manage the updates of third-party applications on the employer's device?

Mohsen Akhavan 791 Reputation points
2024-04-03T03:27:26.3766667+00:00

I'm looking for a solution with minimum administrator effort for keeping up to date on all employer's devices.  

In the organization, I have about 50 devices that they onboarded to Defender for Cloud's portal. All devices showing on Microsoft Defender > Assets > Devices.

Every day we receive a lot of update notifications and our security score decreases based on updates. It's very hard to manually update all applications that are installed on devices. For example, applications are:
Adobe Acrobat
Firefox
Edge

Chrome

Winzip

and etc.

My question how can I update all devices and manage them? With Intune or Defender for Endpoint? How do medium or large companies handle it?

Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
An Azure service that provides threat protection for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds. Previously known as Azure Security Center and Azure Defender.
1,373 questions
Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Intune
A Microsoft cloud-based management solution that offers mobile device management, mobile application management, and PC management capabilities.
5,053 questions
Microsoft Entra ID
Microsoft Entra ID
A Microsoft Entra identity service that provides identity management and access control capabilities. Replaces Azure Active Directory.
21,698 questions

1 answer

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Pavel yannara Mirochnitchenko 12,576 Reputation points MVP
    2024-04-05T09:40:04.27+00:00

    THere are several options for this:

    1. Purchase Intune Suite license and start using brand new Intune feature Application Management, which costs 3€/user/month.
    2. Learn to utilize winget.exe and distribute its commands to update apps. Currently this will not work during autopilot, but should work to on-field computers fine. I see that it still has some minior bugs.
    3. Configure policies or registery keys that applications would update itself. With internet browser it is easy, with other apps not so easy.
    4. Evaluate 3rd party solutions for app patching.
    0 comments

Your answer

Answers can be marked as Accepted Answers by the question author, which helps users to know the answer solved the author's problem.