Patching the Enterprise
George Brandman · Queue · 2005
Software patch management has grown to be a business-critical issue—from both a risk and a financial management perspective. According to a recent Aberdeen Group study, corporations spent more than $2 billion in 2002 on patch management for operating systems.1 Gartner research further notes the cost of operating a well-managed PC was approximately $2,000 less annually than that of an unmanaged PC.2 You might think that with critical mass and more sophisticated tools, the management cost per endpoint in large organizations would be lower, though in reality this may not be the case. The objective of this article is to provide some rationale—drawn from enterprise experience—to put these observations into context and present some approaches that could be useful to combat that trend.