Surprise! You have mystery PCs

In my previous column, I talked about some computers on my company’s network that weren’t getting patched because they weren’t getting rebooted. The good news is that I was able to negotiate an agreement with the business unit managers to reboot those computers once a month, on Sundays. The bad news is that I found some more computers that haven’t been getting patched. And they aren’t running antivirus software either.

Our (Microsoft Windows) computer inventory tools, patching products and security software all rely on one thing: Active Directory. It’s the source of all the information we have about computers on our network, and it controls the security settings on those computers. We have software that installs patches on our computers, and it uses Active Directory to do what it does. Our antivirus product also relies on Active Directory to automatically install and update on our Windows computers. Active Directory is essentially our de facto inventory of Windows PCs. So what happens when we have a computer that’s not on our Active Directory domain? I found out last week.

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