Patch management automation for enterprise cloud

Abstract

Applying patches to operating systems, middleware, and applications is considered a major IT pain point due to several reasons. The operating systems and software are of myriad types, there is interdependency among the updates, operating system, and applications, there is lack of standardization among different enterprise customers, and finally testing the applications and operating systems post-update is challenging. As a result, human operator is involved in different stages of the patching process, making it costly and cumbersome. Cloud can help standardize various offerings to customers, and potentially remove human operators. However, it introduces other challenges such as VM time zones and restoring VMs from snapshots which are not present in traditional enterprise environments. We discuss the challenges of achieving patch automation in a Cloud, and then describe our solution. © 2012 IEEE.