Beyond Patch Management

Systems maintenance, including operating system and software upgrades and patch management, has long been a major factor in security-related incidents. Application upgrades and patches can be equally necessary to system integrity, yet are equally likely to be ignored. In some cases, compromise of an unpatched system could have been avoided through proper system configuration. Implementing a configuration management system can increase the ability of a systems administrator to deal with patch releases and upgrades, on both the operating system and software sides, as well as ease the management of system configurations across any environment, large or small. Yet nothing is perfect, and even the best of systems have security implications that should be considered.