It seems that every day the news is full of reports about the latest business that has been hacked in some way, or has suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. These, of course, are only the ones we know about—research suggests that there are a good number of business that don't publicly admit to large-scale IT security issues (and why would they?). In recent years, this has made businesses—especially at the executive level—extremely wary of change and very focused on ensuring their IT systems are fully (mostly) up to date in terms of security patches. Most times, this is at the expense of software delivery.
When a business has adopted CD and DevOps, the implementation and validation of security patches simply becomes another change to deliver. If the patch is at the operating-system (O/S) level, then...