There is no getting around the fact that the even the nominal use of Microsoft products requires regular component upgrades and patches. When you are a card-carrying Microsoft supporter like I am, and your infrastructure runs the gamut of their product offerings, updating servers and workstations can get downright ugly. Just maintaining the critical updates containing security rollups and patches can be taxing.

My last article focused on the responsibility of the network administrator to test and deploy hotfixes in the enterprise. The basic gist was that if you own the server, you own the responsibility of keeping it patched no matter what OS or applications you choose to run on it.

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