Absolute Application Resilience

Absolute Application Resilience™ delivers the ability to monitor application health and automatically repair and/or re-install unhealthy third-party applications listed in the Application Resilience catalog to restore them to healthy operations.

Absolute Application Resilience leverages Absolute Persistence® technology already in embedded in over 600 million devices, to remotely remediate an application, making it resilient whether it is uninstalled, disabled, or corrupted. As a result, mission-critical applications running on the endpoint self-heal to maintain the endpoint’s security posture.

Application Resilience is currently available to the security industry ecosystem, including enterprises, security vendors (via Absolute Application Persistence-as-a-Service™ offering), and system manufacturers worldwide. Organizations of all sizes have already taken advantage of this technology to self-heal critical applications such as VPN, endpoint protection, device management, data protection, as well as other security and business applications.

The Absolute Agent must be installed on each endpoint to activate Application Resilience. Based on the specific software application to be made resilient and the policy determined by the administrator, the Absolute solution deploys policy files to the device to support the automatic, zero-touch remediation. Once setup is completed, Application Resilience will repair or reinstall the software agent and other critical application components whenever they are removed or tampered with on a device.

Here is how it works:

1. The device calls into the Absolute Platform every 15 minutes.
2. A custom agent script is retrieved and executed on the device.
3. Whenever an Absolute Application Resilience policy is activated or updated through the Absolute Console, an XML policy file, configured specifically, is downloaded to the device.
4. This policy file validates specified pre-deployment conditions (e.g., device type, operating system, device group):
   1. If conditions are met, the correct application is already present on the device.
   2. If conditions are not met, the application components are downloaded and installed as per policy file.

The remediation actions that the Application Resilience engine takes in cases of an unhealthy application can be summarized by the three following options. The administrator can choose any one of the three options when configuring the Application Resilience policies within the Absolute Console:

• Report Only: Every 15 minutes, the Application Resilience engine runs health checks on the endpoint to determine whether the application is installed and running correctly. This includes, but is not limited to, checking if the application is listed in the Windows registry, if the application folder has all critical files and operational subdirectories intact, as well as if the application’s services are running smoothly. The Application Resilience engine sends the application’s health status back to the Absolute Platform. Payloads are sent whenever application health changes occur between scans or at a minimum once every 6 hours whenever no changes take place.
• Report and Repair: If the Application Resilience engine detects an unhealthy application status during the Report phase, it will attempt to remediate the application through steps taken within the confines of the endpoint device. This includes, but is not limited to, restarting the application’s services, primary agent, and remediating corrupted registry files.
• Report, Repair, and Reinstall: If the Repair phase fails to remediate the application’s health, the Application Resilience engine will attempt to download the application’s installer from a pre-set URI on a customer-hosted Web server, or from Absolute’s cloud servers, if a customer chooses for Absolute to host the installer on their behalf as part of the Application Resilience configuration. It will then perform a hash check to authenticate the binary contents of the downloaded installer and run a fresh installation on the endpoint device.

Currently, Application Resilience is supported on devices running Windows 7 and higher. The Absolute team continues to investigate methods to extend this capability to other desktop, laptop, and mobile platforms.

Application Resilience is available for all supported applications through an Absolute subscription. Application health reporting is available through Absolute Visibility or Control, while application remediation is available with Absolute Resilience.

Absolute is continuously adding to its catalog of supported applications. If you have a particular application that you would like to make resilient, contact Absolute Sales to make a request.