| Executive Support
The need for a well planned, strategic security patch management process is imperative. Today, many companies use a bottom-up approach for development and support, in which the IT department develops a security plan without executive sponsorship. To address business needs and to be successful, upper management must appreciate the importance of security patch management and ownership of the process must be clearly defined. If you don’t have upper management support or clear ownership of the process, political obstacles will sometimes defeat champions of patch management, coverage will be spotty, and the overall patch management process will fall out of alignment with your organization’s larger business objectives.
Is Linux more Manageable?
In their study on comparing the total cost of ownership between Windows and Linux, IDC states that the lower TCO costs for Windows are in part because of the “relative immaturity of management tools for Linux.” While it is possible to purchase, or perhaps download, Open Source tools that help with some of these challenges, they are not well-integrated and require additional time and effort to deploy. An alternative is to purchase commercial add-ons. Some, such as IBM’s Tivoli product, can cost upwards of $150,000, which quickly starts to mitigate the acquisition cost advantages of Linux.
“On Linux, our developers and engineers had to practically develop everything from scratch. That made it really costly for us.”
-- Henry Kho, Chief Technology Officer, Earth9
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/asia/crp/search2.asp?CaseID=126
|
