Always test patches         

Always test patches. Last month Microsoft sent out two patches, one for MS windows and one for MS SQL Server, both have had negative impacts on some environments.

IT professionals tend to want to believe and trust their vendors. We forget that corporations are run by humans and all humans make mistakes.

The April windows Microsoft patch is causing some negative outcomes from VPN outages to disks and Availability Groups being dropped.

It is very hard to test everything on your development servers. I know but try to test as often and as much as you can. Even though it is tempting to launch patches to every server and every environment through an automate process all it once. Try to test on a few production servers prior to launching hundreds of servers and thousands of databases at one time. Stage the launching of your patches if you can, by at least 24 hours.

We know experienced people who still apply patches as soon as they come out.

Don’t be that person.