Patching at an OS level (not what the author is talking about, probably) is extremely extremely hard - from an enterprise Microsoft platform production point of

Patching at an OS level (not what the author is talking about, probably) is extremely extremely hard - from an enterprise Microsoft platform production point of view 1) Because there's no budget for tools. It's mostly WSUS and SCCM if you're lucky. 2) Because staff don't even know how to use those tools properly. Can't blame them because there's very poor documentation from MS and very little accessible training on design patterns that integrate them into large corps. 3) It's outsourced. So it's even worse than above. 4) Because management fights it every step of the way. They hate patching because they're stuck in the 80s where they think every patch is deeply documented and you should only apply what's necessary. And you should only apply security - ignoring updates which give critical stability fixes. 5) Because the enterprise as a whole is so poorly documented it's unclear who owns what or if a rollback is possible and what it would affect. So everything is in CYA overdrive. 6) And then nobody working there wants to own it because it's not sexy to patch. (As a geek I think patching is sexy and very fulfilling work, but I'm in the extreme minority). None of this excuses anything. But most largish companies are still in the 80s, with IT managers in the 80s. I can't wait for them all to die.