UPDATE MANAGEMENT IN AZURE – HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT

How familiar does this sound? When updating your Windows and Linux servers, you’re more than likely to:

1. Select a third of your data centre or cloud infrastructure to patch
2. Set aside a Friday afternoon to manually download and install the patches
3. Pay overtime to a technician to reboot all machines on a Saturday during your allocated window
4. Repeat this procedure the following two weekends until all your data and cloud infrastructure is updated

Very familiar, no doubt…

System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) has typically been used to automate this in the past. However, this has changed enabling a more efficient and cost-effective process for you, and a weekend off for your technician. Because Microsoft has moved this functionality into Microsoft Azure so you can use the power of the cloud to manage it for you.

We recently started testing Update Management in Azure as it is now generally available. Update Management uses the same agent that is used for connecting VMs to an existing OMS Workspace which means that most cloud machines have this installed by default.

You can then use Group Policy or your chosen Desired State Configuration management tool to deploy to your on-premise computers.

Then it’s a simple case of enrolling the machines into Update Management and creating an update schedule – you pick the machines you want to update, what updates you want to install and when you want to do it.

What’s Spherica’s view on this change?

Quite simple really – it’s an economical and efficient method to reduce a very large management overhead in an extremely familiar and readily available package.

To help you understand this process, we’ve listed a few informative links below:

Microsoft Azure’s “Update Management solution in Azure” article
Microsoft Azure’s “Keeping your environment secure with Update Management” article
Microsoft Azure’s “Manage Windows updates by using Azure Automation” article