Amdocs Studios delivers cloud-native services for automated patch management at Fortium

About the customer:

Fortium Technologies is a leading provider of digital content protection for the film, entertainment, and broadcast industries. Headquartered in South Wales, UK it works with the world’s biggest media companies to keep sensitive content secure from pirates, hackers, and unintentional distribution.

Challenge: Managing complex infrastructure across multiple regions

Fortium’s infrastructure operated across more than 90 virtual machines (VMs) spanning four AWS regions and multiple time zones. Along with this, its application required high availability nodes and involved complex layering and dependencies.

The scale and complexity however, created particular problems for patch management. This included the need for manual coordination across regions, which was both time-consuming and resource-intensive, while high availability requirements meant any disruption could impact customer operations. Furthermore, frequent patch releases by technology vendors across multiple operating systems meant Fortium’s team had to spend significant time on routine maintenance rather than innovation.

The company sought an automated approach that would maintain system security and performance while freeing developers to focus on their core capabilities.

Solution: Automated patch management with cloud-native services

Amdocs’ Cloud Studio team began by mapping how Fortium’s 90+ virtual machines interacted across the four AWS regions, followed by analyzing the update requirements for different platform layers – an effort that took several months. Throughout the process, the team regularly liaised with the customer to fully understand the infrastructure dependencies and operational constraints.

Due to the environment’s complexity, Amdocs opted against performing simultaneous updates across all systems. Instead, they designed a staggered approach that worked within Fortium’s operational schedule. Significantly, by implementing rolling updates systematically across the four AWS regions, the strategy supported the customer’s needs for frequent updates while minimizing disruption across regions.

The Amdocs Studios team deployed AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent), utilizing its integralPatch Manager capability to automate updates for both operating systems and applications. The team also established a comprehensive tagging protocol to organize different resource groups systematically, enabling Patch Manager to automate patch installation according to Fortium’s preferred schedule.

For future scalability, they also configured the auto-enrollment functionality so new servers automatically inherit patch management automation. The result was an efficient, automated solution that addresses the company’s complex infrastructure management requirements while eliminating manual coordination overhead.