The IT security news over the past year or so has been really bad. Sometimes it seemed that each day brought the story of yet another breach, every one bigger than the one before. According to a recent report, more than one billion records were exposed over more than 1,500 individual incidents. It can be difficult to explain how this can happen. After all, most of these breaches exploit known vulnerabilities for which patches have been available for some time. People outside IT operations ask, what is the hold-up? The experience most people have of patching is on their personal computers, where the process nowadays is fairly streamlined and usually painless. You turn on background patching, and you're done, right? So what's so hard about patching servers in a timely manner? Surely, … [Read More]