Don’t Trust Microsoft’s Patches? Would you Trust Yourself to Fix Them?

Much has been said back and forth in the last couple days over Microsoft’s recent decision to deliver cumulative updates once a month for Windows 7/Windows 8.1 systems. As outlined in our recent poll on this, there’s two distinct camps and those camps are divided pretty sharply.

One camp says it is a great move. It forces organizations to finally move to a common layer that’s vendor supportable and makes the burden of patching easier on administrators. One patch per month means one deployment with less testing.

The other camp, of course, blasts the move. These are the individuals who don’t trust that Microsoft can produce perfect patches and have been bitten more than once by updates that have broken computers and left the business dangling in the wind with blame pointed directly at the patching administrators.

As one of the people on the original team that developed Microsoft’s patching policies back in the day, I have my own opinions and I’ll weigh in soon. So stay tuned.

But, in the interim, I think its worthy to remind IT Pros – particularly those that don’t trust Microsoft’s abilities – that there’s a way to ensure that Microsoft releases better, more trustworthy updates.

Called the Security Update Verification Program (SUVP), Microsoft offers businesses the opportunity to sign up to get advance access (1-2 weeks prior to general release) to security updates to help locate bugs and potential business-halting problems. A signed NDA is required, but you can find out more by contacting your Microsoft account team.