This BigAdmin article discusses the benefits of strategic patch management based on service management and maintenance policies.
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Today, more and more IT organizations are facing the ongoing challenge of keeping up with the pace of required business changes. To make things even worse, the underlying IT infrastructure, which supports vital business functions, is most often composed of heterogeneous components. Therefore, IT organizations face the challenge of having to support a constantly changing IT environment, while at the same time maintaining component and service availability within agreed-to service management, regulatory, and operational standards.
Hardware and software vendors do not make the IT manager's life easier by constantly releasing bug alerts, software updates, bug fixes, firmware updates, optimal hardware configuration suggestions, and best practices. The IT manager and staff need to be able to manage numerous tasks on an ongoing basis:
Read through pages and pages of recommendations.
Sort recommendations by priority.
Filter the ones that are relevant to the system, environment, and application(s) they support.
Justify the changes.
Develop implementation schedules.
Develop installation plans.
Build the changes.
Test the changes.
Verify that no adverse impact has occurred on other components within their IT infrastructure.
All this needs to be done within the terms of the service-level agreement for the business (agreed-to availability, reliability, serviceability targets), and this can be very expensive. Mission impossible, indeed!
An additional difficulty is the need to quantify, in business terms, the benefits of implementing the recommended changes. If you focus on patches only, exactly what is the business benefit of installing a patch?
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