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Re-Engineering Security

An article on CIO Insight.

No surprise, says Christopher Klaus, CTO of Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems Inc: "When you total how much it would cost to roll out security patches rigorously in a Fortune 1,000 environment, the result could easily be more than $20 million. Say it takes four hours to install each patch and make sure the applications still work. Say you're paying someone $80 an hour to do this and it costs $320 to patch that one machine and you have 1,000 servers in your environment. That's now $320,000. Multiply that by a conservative estimate of five as the number of Microsoft and Linux and Cisco and Oracle patches each month, multiply that again by 12 months, and it's about $20 million." Most, Klaus says, would not even try due to sheer cost and manpower considerations. And according to a recent CERT report, many system administrators don't install all the security patches issued "because they don't know how, do not have the resources, do not maintain all of the computers or have computer users who will not let them."