All of us that have had any experience in the IT field have had to deal with patching at some point in time. It's a necessary evil, why an evil? Well if you've had to deal with patches then you know it can be a major pain. When I hear words like SCCM or Patch Tuesday, I cringe, especially if I'm in charge of path management. We all love Microsoft (ahem), but let's be honest, they have more patches than any other software vendor in this galaxy! VMware has their patching, Linux machines are patched, but Windows Servers, there is some heavy lifting when it comes to patching. Most of my memories or experiences of staying up past 12 am to do IT work has revolved around patching, and again, it's not something that everybody jumps to volunteer for. While it's definitely not riveting work, it is crucial to the security of your server, network device, desktops, <plug in system here>. Most software vendors are good about pushing out up to date patches to their systems such as Microsoft, however there are some other types of systems that we as IT staff have to go out and pull down from the vendor's site, this adds more complexity to the patching.
My question is, what are you doing to manage your organization's patching? Are you using SCCM, WSUS or some other type of patch management? Or are you out there still banging away at manually patching your systems, hopefully not, but maybe you aren't a full blown enterprise. I'm curious, because to me patching is the most mundane and painful process out there, especially if you are doing it manually.