SolarWinds Shines in Patching
I talk a lot about patching. Every month I give a preview of Patch Tuesday to get you all pumped to plug your systems.
But there is another side to patching, the tools used to get the job done. Microsoft has its own solutions such as WSUS. But in patching, as in nearly every other area, third parties push the envelope, invent the future and have the best answers.
SolarWinds is one of those third parties. Recently Redmond took a close look at SolarWinds Patch Manager.
The review kind of assumes you use WSUS, but don't like hassle of testing all the patches before releasing them on your machines. SolarWinds helps with that problem, at the same time adding much-needed features to WSUS.
One area of help is easing the deployment of non-Microsoft patches such as Adobe and Java, both of which have more patches than a Three Stooges' truck tire.
It also helps to schedule patching tasks, making it easier to manage and making sure that all this patching actually takes place. You can also decide when and how to deploy which patch.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/11/2013 at 1:19 PM