Maintaining security continues to be one of the biggest issue affecting customers today. Although we have improved our process for releasing updates in a timely manner, we have not had a good track record of keeping our update deployment tools in sync with our security updates. Well this has come to an end this month.
Last week Microsoft released 12 security bulletins touching many different products and platforms, with 3 of the vulnerabilities not detected by MBSA. Previously, all we could offer our SMS customers was additional guidance from the update management solution accelerator, using process to remedy a technology limitation. This month however, the SMS team has stepped up to deliver a new enterprise scanner that scans for these vulnerabilities at the SAME TIME we released the bulletins, allowing our customers to immediately and easily secure their environment.
The SMS team has committed to continue to deliver the ability for SMS to scan for any updates MBSA does not scan for going forward at the time of release until hopefully Windows Update Services releases. This is vital to our customers and it’s great to see our development team step up to the plate.
Although update management conversations with customers are often difficult and uncomfortable, they are a harsh reality of the industry as a whole. SMS has constantly been dragged into competitive battles with pure update management solutions because our customers don’t believe that SMS can detect and deploy all security updates from Microsoft. With the SMS teams commitment demonstrated, we can now firmly tell customers that SMS is THE enterprise update management tool for Microsoft.