Shavlik
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| Private company | |
| Industry | Computer Security |
| Founded | 1993 |
| Founder | Mark Shavlik |
| Headquarters | New Brighton, Minnesota, United States |
| Products |
Shavlik Protect Shavlik SCUPdates |
| Parent | LANDesk |
| Website | www |
Shavlik Protect
Shavlik Technologies was a privately held company founded in 1993 by Mark Shavlik, who was one of the original developers of Windows NT in the late 1980s and early 1990s at Microsoft.
The company provided software and services for network vulnerability assessment and for managing network security patches. Mark Shavlik left his role as CEO when Shavlik Technologies was acquired by VMware in May 2011, then held the position of Vice President and General Manager at VMware until March 2013. In April 2013, LANDesk Software purchased the Shavlik business unit and all rights to the Shavlik products from VMware. During the same period, LANDesk announced a partnership that made VMware an Alliance Partner. Today, Shavlik is an independently managed business unit within LANDesk Software. The Shavlik product line consists of Shavlik Protect Standard, Advanced, and Government editions, Shavlik Patch for Microsoft System Center, Shavlik Management Intelligence, and Shavlik MDM.
Prior to the acceptance of Windows NT as a legitimate, enterprise operating system in the late 1990s, most enterprise software was written for Unix or some other mainframe operating system. Shavlik’s roots were in providing consulting services to help organizations make the leap to Microsoft OS’s and contributed to them delivering products on NT. Shavlik later extended its services business into software security consulting, primarily with businesses in highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare. The services centered on providing a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) to perform security audits and penetration testing.
In the early 2000s the failure to keep software up-to-date by applying patches was a common flag on audits. One of the central challenges in addressing the problem was that companies did not have an easy way to determine which machines were out of date and they did not have a methodology to deploy updates. During this era, Microsoft wrestled with addressing this issue internally. They wanted a tool to detect which NT servers in a large NT server environment were missing patches so "hot fixes" (see Hotfix) could be installed on those machines. However, because these NT servers were critical to operations, Microsoft required that this process be completed without installing any extra software, such as an agent, on the servers.
In an effort to address the "hot fix"issue, Shavlik built the first agentless patch scanner for Windows NT. The product was named HFNetChk (the acronym designating HotFix Network Check). The HFNetChk release was followed by another partnership wherein Shavlik helped build the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA). This tool did minimal patch scanning along with some basic OS configuration checks. It was delivered by Microsoft as part of the Windows 2000 Server Toolkit.
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