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Pau Lo

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servers with no recent updates

From a network administrator perspective, can you think of any real logic why an organization may not apply Microsoft security updates to their test servers? I have been doing some analysis of last updates applied to all servers in a domain, and the common theme on those ‘behind’ seem to be they are test environments for some of our line of business applications. I haven’t had chance to query this with the team who look after the servers as yet but I was interested if you had any theories and/or if this is fairly common?

Additional info: I did check the server OS installed on the systems with no recent updates, as my initial thoughts were those without updates may be unsupported Windows versions which no longer receive updates from Microsoft, hence the lack of recent patching activity, but that doesn't seem to be the case (2012 R2, 2016, 2019 - same product installed on other servers in the domain with recent patches applied).  
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Hayes Jupe
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Pau Lo

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Yeah application stability/and not violating 3rd party software support contracts on updated versions of the OS and other Microsoft apps was on my list of suspicions, but the production servers with the live version of the software are more current than the test servers, which is odd. I would have thought if anything they would have applied the updates to test first, then after testing apply to production. I cant see any reason why they may revert the server back to a point in time where the updates are only current as of early 2020 for example. Strange..
Yeah application stability on updated versions was on my list of suspicions, but the production servers with the live version of the software are more current than the test servers, which is odd.

Yep... thats an indication of poor admin practices - or maybe a test environment that isn't actually used.