2/3/2017

IBM BigFix Patch development has never committed to any kind of SLAs (Service Level Agreement) on the release of new content. With that being said, they do have turn-around targets for the content and they varies based on the category, severity and market demand and are followed strictly by BigFix engineering team. We have also observed that several times, vendors may release a content announcement but the actual link to the content is added after some days which makes it difficult for BigFix to release fixlets. We cannot anticipate delays in releasing content caused due to changes on the vendor side, or any irregularities in content release from vendor side or any other unforeseen circumstances.

Turn-around targets:

• For all flavors of Linux OS & some flavors of Unix (AIX, Solaris), we provide content within 5 business days.

• For Microsoft OS and applications, the content is available anywhere between 24 hrs to 7 business days depending on the category and severity of the patch.

• All Security updates and zero day advisories are released within 24 hours.

• For OSX, we release content within 3 to 5 business days.

• For HP-UX, we release content within 10 business days.

IBM BigFix Patch is continuously evolving the framework to release content and has been quite successful in releasing content within the turnaround target. For e.g. over the last 6 months, majority of the Microsoft content has been released within 6 to 8 hrs and there has been continuous improvement in the release cadence for other OS & applications.

This information originated from the following BigFix Forum discussion: https://forum.bigfix.com/t/sla-on-patch-releases-for-linux