According to the vulnerabity specialist, the linkup will provide for simplified patch management of Microsoft as well as third party programs.

Niels Rasmussen, Secunia's CEO, said: "We are in a unique position for doing this, due to the comprehensiveness and quality of our vulnerability intelligence and our unique scanning technology."

"The value lies in the comprehensiveness, reliability, and action-ability, provided by combining the best of two technologies from Microsoft and Secunia", he said.

Secunia says that the end-to-end scanning and patching solution will allow companies worldwide to come full circle in their security operations in a simple and automated way, ending the days of time-consuming, labor-intensive, and troublesome patching.

Rasmussen says that program vulnerabilities represent an increasing threat to companies' IT security, as all it takes is one vulnerability for a cyber criminal to gain access to the internal network, allowing other security measures to be circumvented.

Due to the cumbersome scope of patching and the lack of network visibility so far, he explained, companies have often overlooked third-party programs in their patching operations, while Microsoft programs have been automatically managed by WSUS or SCCM.

To solve this problem and assist companies in dealing with vulnerability threats, Secunia CSI 4.0 is billed as integrating directly with Microsoft WSUS and SCCM for simplified patch management, facilitating the distribution of the latest security updates for all programs, Microsoft and third party.

Microsoft says its WSUS/SCCM technology has a large coverage, with WSUS deployed in virtually all corporate networks today due to its patching capabilities for Microsoft products.

This, says the software giant, further complements Secunia CSI 4.0, which provides scanning, mapping, and security evaluation of all the installed programs.