Organizations are always concerned with improving efficiencies to make business flow smoother. Some of the biggest inefficiencies in any business revolve around time wasted on operational tasks. Whether it is a stale accounting process, or something as trivial as routing phone calls to the proper department, saving time by improving a process can mean more profits, which is what business is all about.

When it comes to the technology side of a business, one of the most inefficient processes is in IT operations, specifically when it comes to patch management. Patching is more involved than just the well-known Microsoft “Patch Tuesday” announcements, which grace our mailboxes every month. Patching can involve hardware updates, as well as updates to every software package that operates on varying systems within an organization. This can amount to thousands of patches for even a medium sized business, sometimes more.

For a large enterprise, such as federal information systems, patch management is more than a full time job. What’s more, in the federal arena, every patch must be approved before it is tested on a system in the environment. When the system in question is part of critical infrastructure, the stakes are as high as possible. Unlike most businesses that can withstand a minor disruption while they roll back a bad patch, the reliability standards of an electrical company do not allow such downtime.

For example, recall the software “glitch” that grounded more than 1,000 airline flights. The disruptions created a backlog of rescheduled passengers, which caused a ripple effect across the globe as the industry attempted to catch up after the event.

For industries that are not part of the federal system, even though the stakes may not be as high, patch management is still a significant area of inefficiency. When (Read more...)