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Time to End Microsoft's Patch Tuesday?

Posted by Zonk on from the plenty-of-time-for-trickery dept.

buzzardsbay writes "Techtarget's resident security curmudgeon, Dennis Fisher, is calling for an end to Microsoft's monthly security patching cycle. Fisher points out that 'a hacker only needs one unpatched system, one little crack in the fence in order to launch a major attack on a given network. The sheer volume of the patches Microsoft releases each month makes it quite difficult for even the most conscientious IT department to get every patch out to all of the affected systems in a reasonable amount of time.'"

1 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. My Thoughts by KenshoDude · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am the Sys Admin for ensuring that our roughly 1800 desktops and notebooks get updated with the latest updates. Microsoft's strategy is the very least of my concerns. The patches show up on WSUS the Wednesday morning after they are released. I read up on them, noting any "caveats" in the KB articles and inform our help desk if I find anything signficant. Then, I set my approvals and decline any superseded updates. The clients check in and install the updates over night. I am not sure where all this talk about long nights with Red Bull and whatever come into play. If we have mission critical systems, we withold approval for that group for a week or so until we are confident that there are no undisclosed "caveats." Super simple.

    I like having a regular schedule for updates. But I wouldn't mind a little more frequency. Why not the first and third tuesday of every month? Sounds reasonable to me.

    Now if were only that easy for all the other software vendors out there like Adobe (Acrobat / Flash), Sun (Java), and so on. Where are their enterprise patch management solutions? Why can't I configure my Java clients to check into to one of my servers to automatically apply security updates? Instead I have to spend more money on a 3rd party patch management solution. And I haven't found one yet that is as reliable and simple as WSUS.