SolarWinds reminds IT professionals on the importance of keeping all patches for third party applications up to date in light of the recent Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 7 vulnerabilities.
"In the past, patch concerns were primarily about fixing bugs in the product, but organizations not applying security patches to Windows, Flash, Java, and many other third party apps are now prime targets for infestations," said Lawrence Garvin, SolarWinds Head Geek and patch management expert. "What's more, all vulnerabilities have a history. And in the case of Java, it's important to remember that only 18 of the issues identified since Java 7's release are unique to Java 7.
"Of the 84 vulnerabilities identified since Java 7's release, 66 of them also existed in Java 6, while 40 still exist in Java 5 and will never be fixed. The history of these vulnerabilities is an example that underscores the importance of diligent and continuous patch management in every business environment."
Garvin said the press coverage around Java 7's security issues may be influencing some organizations to fail to upgrade their Java 6 installations to Java 7, thinking that Java 7 is flawed, when in fact the entire core of the Java platform has vulnerabilities.
Oracle has announced that no new updates will be forthcoming for Java 6 after February 2013, so that any additional vulnerability discovered in Java 7 - and also existing in Java 6 - will never be patched after that time.
In an effort to help enable IT professionals to manage any exposure they may have to the JRE 7 vulnerability, SolarWinds recently updated SolarWinds Patch Manager, its patch management solution. Now, all IT professionals can fully deploy the latest Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 7 patch to their environments using the 30-day free trial version of this product.
The Latest
Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...
Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...
Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...
While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...
For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...
As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...
The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...
The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...
Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...
Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...