PC Management Challenge #1: Complex Patch Management

In today’s corporate environments, PCs often start with a master image of the Windows operating system, but as soon as an individual begins using their PC the image takes on a life of its own. If you have 10,000 PCs, you have 10,000 variants of Windows.  Microsoft “patch Tuesdays” have become a dreaded pastime for many desktop administrators. Even though many utilize central patching tools, they never really know for sure what is going to happen when a patch hits a PC. In most cases, everything goes fine. However, in those cases when it goes badly, it goes very badly.

The IT pros we have spoken with have told us that a failed patch is often a desk side visit. This is painful proposition when it is a frustrated end-user down the hall. It’s a “career limiting” proposition when the user is the CEO in a hotel room in Beijing. NxTop takes the pain and risk out of patching in a couple of different ways:

• Instead of applying a patch to 10,000 divergent copies of Windows, the IT person applies the patch to a single Windows virtual machine that is not in use by an end-user. They test it. They publish it. That’s it.
• The next time the end-user reboots their PC, they boot into a patched image. They never saw or felt the patch. They still have all of their unique data and settings. In the unlikely event that there are complications with a system update (say, in a Beijing hotel room), the PC boots into the last known good configuration.