Having good Patch managment is essential, and being able to keep on top of your microsoft patching is paramount to good security. It is all too easy to get caught behind in keeping systems upto date, since almost all software needs patching these days. Clawing your way back from out of date patches on servers can be a nightmare however automating patch managment if setup correctly with correctly configured maintenance windows makes life easier. Using products like WSUS, or better still SCCM 2012 R2 and having well built resiliant system architecture, can remove the pain from this task. Having a robust patching policy, and management buy in from the business is also essential. This enables the IT team to bring servers down at an appropriate time for that inevitable reboot is just as important and can make the process run far more effectively. Does this bring into question whether this is an IT issue, a resourcing issue or a business strategy issue? Getting down time approval from a section of the business can be tricky without managment buy in, however, not letting the IT team take down that all important business critical system for patching is in itself a risk. A risk assement needs to be carried out by the business as to whether they delay remediating that zero day vulnerabilty vs letting the IT team patch the server and losing potential revenue whilst the server is down vs patching the system which subsequntly causes a system failure. All businesses should be asking themselves ‘what are my vulnerabilities?’. Subsequently what is the impact vs likelihood of this resulting in my overall risk? Of course this will be a case by case decision, with multiple factors, ie what is the patch fixing, the system archetecture etc. This needs to be weighed up against the consenquenses of not applying a patch ie can you afford to be hacked…
What are your thoughts?