A lack of corporate mandates to quickly install Oracle Corp.’s security patches may be leaving many Oracle database installations exposed to vulnerabilities for extended periods of time, according to survey results released last week.
From the article:
In a pair of online surveys jointly conducted by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and Oracle between May and August last year, only 26% of the 150-plus respondents said their companies require the vendor’s quarterly patch updates to be applied on all systems.
Another 6% said they are required to install the patches on critical systems only, the IOUG and Oracle reported. Meanwhile, 30% said their companies don’t have any policies for Oracle’s patches, while 32% said database administrators have to do risk or cost-benefit analyses to justify the patching of databases.
In addition, the survey results showed that most of the respondents aren’t keeping up with Oracle’s patch releases. Only 30% said they typically install patches before the company issues its next batch of fixes, according to the report. Twenty-five percent said they were one update cycle behind, while 26% said they were off by two to four cycles. Another 11% said they hadn’t installed any of Oracle’s patches.
Here’s a link to download the full report and survey results. More commentary at Michelle, DBA Unleashed.
