Ever since the I Love You (ILoveyou) worm hit the Internet in May 2000 and the Nimda worm hit the Internet in September 2001, patch management has become a very important part of maintaining network security. Those worms revealed the importance of patch management because it was vulnerabilities in Windows that had allowed the worm to spread so fast around the world, and Microsoft had released patches for these vulnerabilities several months earlier.
At the time, patching an operating system was a very labor-intensive task. Windows Update was available, but you still had to run it manually on each machine that needed updates. This meant connecting to the Internet, which was really too dangerous for corporate networks while ILoveyou and Nimda were spreading. As a result, network administrators and PC support staff ended up traveling to all their computers with a CD full of updates to get them patched up and safe again.
Microsoft released Software Update Services in 2002, and System Management Server (SMS) 2.0 got some patch-management functionality through an add-on feature pack. However, it wasn’t really until SMS 2003 that there was a truly functional patch-management solution for the corporate enterprise. SMS 2003 used Microsoft Update technology to detect and install its updates, and it allowed reporting to show the progress. This was not without its problems; as more and more patches became available for Microsoft’s operating systems and applications, this patch solution became more taxing on server and workstation resources.
The Software Updates feature in Configuration Manager 2007 was rewritten from the ground up and made the software update process even more effective by leveraging the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) product and incorporating its capabilities into patch management and also by taking some of the load off Configuration Manager clients in the process. With the introduction of Configuration Manager 2012, Microsoft made configuring, deploying, and maintaining the software update role much easier than before.
In following posts, you will learn to
◆ Plan to use Software Updates
◆ Configure Software Updates
◆ Use the Software Updates feature to manage software updates
◆ Use automatic update deployment to deploy software updates
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