There's a real irony to my article this week. Just as I began to write, I got an e-mail from one of my hosted service providers. To paraphrase the message, it says: "Dear Customer, we will be performing maintenance on your application server for a few hours this weekend. We plan to install critical software updates and security patches. During this window you may experience brief interruptions in service. Sorry for the inconvenience."
You've seen similar messages before. Perhaps you even write them and send them out to your own customers when you need to install software updates and security fixes. While the process of installing software updates is disruptive and expensive -- Gartner estimates downtime for a critical system costs $42,000 an hour -- there's no getting around the need to apply updates. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of the attacks in the wild exploit known vulnerabilities.
It's essential to patch systems to keep them reliable and secure. But while you must patch, must you reboot the server to apply the patch? Not necessarily.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Install software updates and security patches without rebooting
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