Rolling out patches and configuration fixes across hundreds or thousands of systems is a constant balancing act. IT and security teams need to act quickly to remediate vulnerabilities and enforce policies, but rushing an untested update can lead to unexpected outages or compliance drift. Traditionally, teams mitigate this risk by testing changes on a small subset of endpoints before wider deployment. It’s a manual, time-consuming step that can bottleneck an otherwise automated process.

The challenge has been clear: How can organizations maintain the speed of automation without sacrificing confidence of thorough testing?

That’s where Test and Deploy for Automation comes in, a new feature introduced in SecPod Saner Continuous Vulnerability and Exposure Management (CVEM) 6.5 update. This capability extends SecPod’s proven “test and deploy” workflow to automated Patch Management (PM) and Compliance Management (CM) jobs, combining the fast pace of automation with the assurance of a pre-deployment testing phase. In essence, you can now automate patching and compliance remediation tasks while making sure updates are thoroughly tested before full rollout.

What is Test and Deploy for Automation?

Test and Deploy for Automation is all about adding an intelligent testing stage to your automated update workflows. With this feature, administrators set up their patch or compliance job to run in two phases. The first is a test phase and a deployment phase, where the system applies the selected patches or configuration changes to a designated test group of devices. These can be a small sampling of endpoints; for example, a few machines from each department or site that act as canaries.

The update is applied to this test group automatically, and the system then evaluates the outcome against criteria you define as “success.” Only when the pre-defined success criteria are met on the test devices will the job automatically proceed to deploy the updates to the remaining target devices, the broader deployment group. If the criteria aren’t met, the rollout halts, allowing your team to investigate and address issues before they impact everyone.

In practice, Test and Deploy for Automation lets you combine a staged rollout approach with hands-off automation. It enables fully automated patch and compliance remediation with a built-in testing phase as a safeguard. You can define custom success criteria for the test run to decide what “good enough to deploy” means. For instance, 100% of test machines updated without errors, or no critical services impacted post-patch. The feature also gives you the flexibility to group your endpoints into test and deployment sets as you see fit, ensuring rollouts happen in a controlled, known order.

Once the test passes, the process moves to full deployment automatically, with no manual intervention needed. In short, the entire cycle from initial test to organization-wide update can run on autopilot after you configure it.

Core Capabilities and Benefits

The Test and Deploy for Automation feature brings several powerful capabilities to SecPod Saner’s Patch and Compliance modules:

• Integrated Testing in Automation: Add a built-in pre-deployment testing phase to automated patch and remediation jobs, marrying speed with safety.
• Custom Success Criteria: Define what a “successful” test looks like (e.g. all test devices updated with no failures) to automatically validate updates before broad deployment.
• Phased Rollouts with Grouping: Organize endpoints into distinct test and deployment groups for a phased rollout, so updates are first proven on a small scale before hitting your entire fleet.
• Hands-Off Completion: Once the success criteria are satisfied, the system fully automates progression from test to full deployment, requiring no manual trigger or oversight to finish the job.
• Risk Reduction: By catching any issues in a contained test run, you minimize the risk of problematic patches causing widespread disruption. This approach helps keep update deployments consistent and reliable across all systems, since only vetted updates go live everywhere.

Together, these capabilities mean that your team can move fast on routine patching and compliance tasks without constantly looking over your shoulder. Test and Deploy for Automation effectively builds a safety net into your automation pipeline. You have the freedom to schedule updates or remediation jobs to run at scale, knowing the platform will verify the outcome in real-world conditions on a pilot group before unleashing changes onto your production environment.

The flexibility to choose testing groups and criteria also means the process adapts to your organization’s unique needs. Whether you prefer extremely strict test thresholds or just a basic smoke test, you configure the rules. This level of control guarantees that automation doesn’t turn into a risky “all-or-nothing” gamble, but rather a measured, intelligent workflow.

Equally important is what happens after a successful test: everything else happens automatically. There’s no need to babysit the job or perform a second rollout manually. Once your defined success conditions are met, Saner CVEM 6.5 seamlessly continues on to deploy the updates to all remaining devices. In other words, when the test passes, the system itself green-lights the enterprise-wide deployment.

Your team can confidently go about other work while the patch or fix propagates. And if something goes wrong during testing, the issues are limited to the small test pool and can be fixed before any broader impact, all without any surprise late-night fire drills.

Advancing Automation in SecPod Saner CVEM

The introduction of Test and Deploy for Automation significantly improves SecPod Saner’s automation story. By blending rapid automation with built-in validation, this feature empowers IT and security teams to accelerate remediation workflows without losing confidence in the outcomes. It reduces risk, maintains consistency across endpoints, and validates updates under real-world conditions with zero manual intervention once configured. For organizations, this translates to safer and more reliable update cycles. You can apply critical patches and compliance changes faster, knowing that every rollout is proven on a small scale first.

In the bigger picture, Test and Deploy for Automation is a major step forward for the Saner CVEM platform’s mission of intelligent automation. It ensures that “automated” doesn’t equate to “uncontrolled.” Instead, SecPod is enabling automation at scale that you can trust. Teams can adopt a more aggressive patching cadence and enforce compliance fixes more frequently, all while resting assured that the automation itself will catch and prevent potential problems. This not only frees up your IT staff from tedious manual rollout checkpoints, but also gives them peace of mind that security updates won’t accidentally introduce new issues.

With the release of Saner CVEM 6.5, SecPod continues to refine and strengthen its platform for modern enterprise needs. Test and Deploy for Automation joins features like remote scripting and centralized policy enforcement to make sure that maintaining a secure, compliant environment can be both fast and safe. It’s an evolution that lets you move at the speed of automation, but with the prudence of a careful pilot test in every cycle.

In the end, this feature helps ensure your endpoints stay protected and up-to-date seamlessly, combining the best of both worlds: agility and assurance in your continuous vulnerability and exposure management process.

All of this happens automatically once you set it up, giving you the best of both worlds, so you can patch and remediate at scale with confidence.