Been Doing It The Same Way For Years? Think Again.

[Want Bob to stop complaining? Change your
practices.]

[Don’t delay change – it can cost you]

[“Always done it that way”? Think again.]

[Why you should think again about doing it the old
way]

[Why you should think again about doing it the same old
way]

As IT professionals, we all reach a certain point in our IT
career where we realize that some of our everyday tasks are done
the same way year after year without anyone questioning why it’s
done that way.

Despite the constant change and improvement in technology, some
things just get done the same ineffective way without any real
thought behind it because “that’s the way it’s always been
done.”

A typical example: patching

Month in, month out, a day comes along that is dedicated to
patching.

Patching may be more automated than before because you no longer
need to log into each system to patch and reboot tediously. It’s a
step forward, but the patching process remains the same.

Patching is disruptive, slow, error-prone, and rarely fast
enough to keep up with new vulnerabilities. Why disruptive? We all
know that every time a maintenance window comes along, Bob from
accounting will remind everyone how “the company’s IT is going to
mess up our week.”

He’s right, of course, because performing patching the way it’s
always done impacts a business by completely stopping operations or
slowing everything down. Companies and their stakeholders don’t
like it, and it means that patching reinforces the idea of IT as a
money sink inside an organization rather than a driver of business
value.

Room for improvement… but no improvement

Patching is also slow. Assuming a month-to-month timeframe and
many hours of labor every time, patching as it’s been done all
these years is too slow to be an effective deterrent for cyber
incidents but time-consuming enough that it always feels like it’s
taking too long to do.

But if we’ve been patching the same way all these years, surely
we’re doing it that way because it is foolproof, right? Not so
much, and that’s true for many other prevalent IT practices, too,
where there’s just no good reason for how things are done.

Concerning patching, every sysadmin would identify with a story
where…just the other day…instead of selecting only the hot-spare
web servers for patching, the management tool somehow deployed
patches to all of the web servers, which then rebooted them all at
the same time.

Those web servers took a while to come back up, and of course,
Bob from accounting quickly pointed out that the company lost “a
ton of money” in lost sales during the downtime.

Bob is sometimes annoying like that because, yet again, he’s
right. However, patching has always been done this way, so everyone
continues to do it this way – and Bob will keep complaining because
IT practices don’t change.

Sometimes a better way is already out there

Here’s the eye-opener part that offers a lesson for every case
of “we’ve always done it that way in IT”: there are safer, more
efficient, disruption-free ways to perform patching.

For many years, live patching has offered an alternative to the
old way of patching. It has been tested thoroughly and works
flawlessly for organizations, delivering considerable benefits. Why
is it not used universally?

Live patching makes the process faster, though “immediate” is an
even better word. Live patching is also less error-prone, and there
is no disruption. Live patches are auditable and reversible and
serve as rapid protection against new threats.

Yet, for some reason, live patching isn’t universally adopted,
and the only explanation for that is resistance to change, though
some teams may simply not be that well informed.

Find a better way? Adopt it

Understandably, cutting-edge, untested technology isn’t for
everyone. But ignoring a tried and tested technology^[1] that improves outcomes
is never a good idea.

Maybe it’s time to modernize operations by shifting gears and
adopting the latest way of doing things. IT practitioners should
stay aware of changing practices and watch out for better ways to
do things. We need to question whether our everyday practice
reflects best practices.

Do that, and we might find that Bob stops complaining about
IT.

This article is written and sponsored by , the industry leader
in enterprise-grade . TuxCare
offers unrivaled levels of efficiency for developers, IT security
managers, and
seeking to affordably enhance and simplify their cybersecurity
operations. TuxCare’s Linux kernel live security patching, and
standard and
assist in securing and supporting over one million production
workloads.^[2][3][4][5]