Randolph West wants none of your excuses:
Folks, we all like to make sure we’re doing our level best to make things work smoothly.
So why am I staring at someone’s server that has never been updated since it was first set up almost three years ago?
Do better, so that I don’t have to yell at you. Seriously.
When we ignore updates, we are ignoring preventable catastrophic problems; we are ignoring fixes to security bugs, performance bugs, and data corruption bugs. Each one of these things could give you a really bad day. In two out of three cases it might even be a career-limiting move.
There are risks to patching servers, but the downside risk tends to be much larger and administrators need to be able to mitigate update risks through redundancy, automation, and having a rollback plan if needed. It’s more work than not patching, but the outcome is much better.