I’ve talked a lot about patching, ever since my first column for Computerworld way back in 2008. Then, I had to struggle with the IT department to get them to do any patching. The backlog was immense — not only had the Windows operating systems running on our servers never been patched, but neither had their software applications. My vulnerability scanner found literally hundreds of thousands of patchable vulnerabilities.

It took a lot of work over a couple of years to work down that backlog and get everything current. And then we had to start on workstations. After all that, we finally reached a stable baseline with few vulnerabilities, but the next challenge was to start patching on a regular basis and keep all our computers updated month-to-month.

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