If there were ever a defining case for the need for a well-designed patch management strategy, the Federal Reserve Bank is it. In its New York location alone, the Fed maintains more that 10,000 discrete devices, including AS/400, HP-UX, Linux, Novell NetWare, and Sun Solaris servers, as well as a huge installed base of Microsoft Windows.

The awesome responsibility of managing these assets falls on the shoulders of Sean Mahon, the New York Fed's vice president of system management.

"Our real problem is cross-platform," Mahon says. "Fortunately, our Unix-based platforms are more stable in regards to new security vulnerabilities. It's the Microsoft platforms that have become extremely resource-intensive."

By Oliver Rist at Linux Insider.

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