Creating a patching strategy
How many times have you heard, "This attack could be prevented if the systems were properly patched"? And the cost of those attacks was between millions of dollars to even bankruptcy, so here, the question is: Why is this still happening?
Well, the answer is because patching is not as simple as it sounds.
The complexity of patching
Let´s take a look at the most common complexity factors associated with patching.
Legacy systems
Almost all companies have a degree of legacy systems in production. Most of the time, this is because some applications were designed to run only on a specific OS, and migrating it to a supported OS may cause compatibility issues, so companies decided just to accept the risk.
The problem is that in those cases, you may have some unsupported OSes (or even apps, services, and protocols) that bring additional risks to your infrastructure.
The recommendations to patch legacy systems are outlined here...
