IT Security

One of the most basic actions that can be taken to secure a computer system is to ensure that the software on that system has the latest security updates installed.  Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and our other vendors, make these updates available to their user communities through a number of methods.  Their primary method is to have the vendor's software on our systems check with the vendor's website to automatically download and install updated software when it is released by the vendor.

Unfortunately, on rare occasions, there have been automatic updates that have conflicted with certain system configurations and caused those systems to fail, sometimes requiring our having to reimage the affected systems. 

To address this issue for Microsoft systems, OIT has implemented a tool, provided by Microsoft, which will download available Microsoft updates to an OIT server that will first distribute the updated software to a limited number of test computers.  We then can test the impact of the updates on representative systems and, if testing is successful, we can then release the updates to Windows systems on our network.

Participation in the Windows Software Update Service (WSUS), is mandatory for University standard DeSC systems, and is voluntary but strongly recommended for departmental non-DeSC systems.

For a more in-depth technical description of WSUS, and instructions on how to participate, please click here to visit the OIT KnowledgeBase article on the subject.