Why This Chapter Matters

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Organizations depend on information technology resources and expect them to be trustworthy: a few hours of downtime is expensive, and a publicized security compromise can be disastrous. Viruses and worms such as Klez, Nimda, and SQL Slammer exploit known fixable security vulnerabilities in software to attack computers, and then use those compromised computing resources to launch new attacks. After a computer is infected, the virus or worm often opens new security vulnerabilities that enable an attacker to explore your internal network, shut down network resources, and gather confidential files.

Update management is a process that gives you control over the deployment and maintenance of software updates on your production computers. An effective update management process could have prevented a majority of the security compromises that have occurred on Microsoft Windows networks in the past few years. While update management might seem like a time-consuming, costly process, it is far more efficient to proactively update computers than it is to repair them after a known vulnerability is exploited.

Before You Begin

This chapter presents the skills and concepts that are required to plan an update management infrastructure to maintain an entire network of Windows-based computers. Because this chapter focuses on planning, it does not require any hardware or software.

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