Windows 10: Patch Tuesday is not dead

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Forget the reports that it's the end of Patch Tuesday, and say hello to Windows Update for Business, says Davey Winder

update button

There has been a lot of reporting regarding the announcement at the Microsoft Ignite conference that Windows 10 will introduce an "Update for Business" system for maintenance updates.

The notion of incremental updates courtesy of a shift towards Platform-as-a-Service surprises nobody who is even the slightest bit informed.The thought of constant "rolling upgrades" would be enough, however, to send most enterprise sysadmins and CISOs into terminal shock.

Hence, Update for Business which allows the enterprise to determine what is updated and at what time and, importantly, retain full integration with existing management software suites.

WUFB, as this is being called by everyone in my circle of work colleagues, will apparently operate using the Windows 10 peer-to-peer update delivery mechanism, although exactly how this will be achieved in a fully secure manner is still somewhat open to question.

Many have been running around "Chicken Little" style and proclaiming that "Patch Tuesday is Dead" at the top of their voice, yet this couldn't be further from the truth. Surely the process will be up to the enterprise itself, which can either choose to enable WUFB or stick to traditional in-house update distribution whereby the updates would go out on Patch Tuesday as normal.

I can only assume that the confusion arises from the fact that consumers will see an end to the Patch Tuesday phenomena and instead get rolling updates pushed to them in Android style as they are available. Because consumers don't tend to use fancy system management suites nor worry too much about prioritisation of client machine deployments, the Patch Tuesday RIP message has acceptable and WUFB largely (and perhaps understandably) ignored by less business-focused media.

Trouble is, at the smaller end of the enterprise scale there still seems to be plenty of confusion about WUFB and push upgrades. This shouldn't be, and the golden rule of not deploying system updates before they have been tested on non-critical machines remains as firm as ever.

I'm glad that Microsoft is retaining a variety of update management solutions for the business user, not that it really matters in the short term. I know of not a single enterprise which is planning on any kind of Windows 10 migration this year, or next for that matter...

Davey Winder
Davey Winder

Davey is a three-decade veteran technology journalist specialising in cybersecurity and privacy matters and has been a Contributing Editor at PC Pro magazine since the first issue was published in 1994. He's also a Senior Contributor at Forbes, and co-founder of the Forbes Straight Talking Cyber video project that won the ‘Most Educational Content’ category at the 2021 European Cybersecurity Blogger Awards.

Davey has also picked up many other awards over the years, including the Security Serious ‘Cyber Writer of the Year’ title in 2020. As well as being the only three-time winner of the BT Security Journalist of the Year award (2006, 2008, 2010) Davey was also named BT Technology Journalist of the Year in 1996 for a forward-looking feature in PC Pro Magazine called ‘Threats to the Internet.’ In 2011 he was honoured with the Enigma Award for a lifetime contribution to IT security journalism which, thankfully, didn’t end his ongoing contributions - or his life for that matter.

You can follow Davey on Twitter @happygeek, or email him at davey@happygeek.com.