"We've joked that the fastest way to get fired as a sysadmin is to break email, and the fastest way to break email is to patch Exchange," he says. "Patch management these days is kind of a continuous process," Childs continues, adding that programs like Exchange and SharePoint can be tricky to patch. "The number of things that Microsoft is patching – Microsoft is patching stuff in Linux now, which was completely unheard of in 2008," Childs says. These days, with the move to cloud and the ever-expanding attack surface, 100-plus security fixes per month is common. The "unwritten rule" used to be no more than 12 security bulletins per month, based on what both Microsoft and its customers could handle, Childs says. The volume of patches issued each month has exploded over the past two decades. So prior to starting their weekends, admins knew that, the following Tuesday, patches fixing a dozen or so CVEs would be released.Īnd no, that's not a typo. Plus, in the early days of Patch Tuesday Microsoft provided advance notification to customers. "It was a very difficult time for system administrators prior to Patch Tuesday to plan, to test, and then add resources to roll these patches out." "The patch management process back then was completely non-existent as well, so that made it that much harder," Childs tells The Register. After Microsoft moved to this monthly cadence, "patch consumption went up significantly." Predictability for IT admins…īy all accounts, the move was welcomed by IT administrators because it gave them predictability. "So that's when Patch Tuesday was born," she says.
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