Overview
The
biggest challenge facing IT professionals today is security. It is
critical for an IT administrator to have the right tools to help
manage security-related issues in your environment. And where that
starts is having security updates and patches installed on your
workstations and servers in a timely manner. The challenge in
dealing with security issues is that timing is important. The
window of response for dealing with security issues has gotten more
narrow as hackers are getting much better at reverse engineering
system patches to exploit the holes. In this chapter, we cover the
following topics:
-
SMS solutions for security and patch
management
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Phases of software update management
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Benefits of software update management
-
MOM and security management
For IT administrators running SMS in their
environment, it is important to understand how SMS can be used to
deal with security and patch management-related issues. To help
provide a first line of defense, it is important to use SMS
effectively to automatically deploy software updates and to deal
with the failures and issues that arise in these types of
deployments. And because security exploits can occur in almost any
program, it is important to have a comprehensive strategy that goes
beyond simple updates to the operating system. Patching server
applications including SQL Server, Exchange, and IIS is critical.
In addition, making sure that client applications such as Microsoft
Office and others are up-to-date helps to mitigate the risk of
security exploits.
We'll
review the features in SMS and MOM that can help IT administrators
to keep their environment more secure. While the tools can't solve
the problem completely, you'll see how to leverage the software and
systems management tools in your environment to reduce your
exposure and more effectively update your systems.