It’s security week here at DCAC (you can join us on Friday January 19th, 2018 at 2PM in a webcast to talk more about security) and I wanted to focus on patches. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the impact of Spectre and Meltdown to SQL Server (and just about every other thing that runs on silicon chips). Well in the interim, Microsoft has patched all currently supported editions of SQL Server—the patches can be hard to find but are all summarized in this KB article. I can’t emphasize enough the need to patch all of your infrastructure for this—the vulnerabilities are big and they are really bad. While you may have physically isolated servers (though these are a rarity in modern IT) an attacker may have gained access to your network via other credentials that were taken from an unpatched server.

So to summarize, you need to patch the following:

System BIOs

Hypervisor

Guest Operating System

RDBMS

Browser

Your Mouse (probably)

That’s a lot of patching. And a lot of downtime, and testing. It sucks, and yeah, it’s probably also going to impact server performance. You still need to do it—unless you want to be next guy blamed by the CEO of Equifax.

Which brings me to my next topic.

What is your patching strategy?

In my career I found enterprise IT to be stodgy and not always open to new ideas. We were also slow to move generally, and operated a couple of years and versions behind modern IT. However, all of the large enterprises where I worked (5 different Fortune 100s) were really good at centralized management of systems. Which made things like patching much easier. At the telecom company where I worked, I remember having to patch all Windows Servers to fix a remote desktop vulnerability—it was one my first tasks there. We had System Center Configuration Manager to patch (and inventory the patch) of all of those servers. We had a defined maintenance window, and good executive support to say we are going to apply system updates, and you should build customer facing applications to be fault tolerant.

Smaller organizations have challenges with patching—Cabletown had a team of two people who’s job was to manage SCCM. Many smaller orgs are lucky if they have a sysadmin and Windows Server Update Services. So how do you manage updates in a small org? My first recommendation would be to get WSUS—we have it on our organization, and we’re tiny. However, you still need to manage rebooting boxes, and applying SQL Server CUs (and testing, maybe). So what can you do?

Use the cloud for testing patches

Get a regular patching window

Use WSUS to check status of updates

When in doubt, apply the patch. I’d rather have to restore a system than be on the news

I mentioned the cloud above—one thing you may want to consider for customer facing applications is platform as a service offerings like Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure SQL Database, and Azure Web Apps. These services are managed for you, and have been architected to minimize downtime for updates. For example if you are using Azure SQL Database, when you woke up to the Meltdown/Spectre news, your databases were already protected. Without significant downtime.