Periodically, Symantec distributes security updates, best practice policies, and agent software improvements through LiveUpdate technology. Security updates add new checks and modules or improve existing checks. Best practice policies add or update industry standard policies, such as HIPAA and GLBA, to ensure that your computer configurations conform to these standards. Software upgrades enhance the manager or the agent programs. For example, you may upgrade your software to improve efficiency or to allow additional platform support. For Symantec ESM content, which includes security updates and best practice policies, LiveUpdates requires that you obtain a separate license. This license does not affect component updates such as software improvements.

For Symantec ESM 9.0, LiveUpdates are granular, which means that they include the updates that are specific to the modules that you use.

For example, if you use Symantec ESM exclusively in a UNIX environment, LiveUpdates only download the LiveUpdate content that pertains to UNIX modules. Also, when you perform policy runs on agents, the agent gets the LiveUpdate content only for the modules that you use in that policy run. In this way, the amount of information that is transferred during the LiveUpdate of agents is reduced. For large policy runs, it can significantly increase performance.

You should use LiveUpdates monthly to ensure that you have the best possible security assessment tools.