Methodologically Upgrading A Production System

System administrators face this challenge on a regular basis. They receive security updates and expected to perform this task seamlessly, without affecting production work on servers, workstations, client systems located locally or remotely. Patching and upgrading systems has been and still is a revolving task. System administrators receive security alerts, messages, and notifications of available software updates countless times on an irregular basis. We perform the patch, the upgrade, and the fix. A day later, we are informed of another security patch. What happens intermittently, when you receive the notification of a patch and when the patch is successfully applied to your production system? Simply applying the security patch to the production system(s) without executing a set of trial runs of the patch increases the risk of downtime to the user community of your system(s). Administrative work covers multiple day-to-day operations. This paper attempts to outline the process an administrator should follow after a security patch has been released. Since this process is a consistently repeatable task, a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) can be revised and enhanced as needed.