Patches are a pain.

Patches are often sources of pain for IT.  Many of the patches must be applied since they are there to fix security holes that pose a threat to your business.  And of course this is the reason why security patches are mandated by regulations such as SOX and PCI-DSS.

But most IT admins have learned (some the hard way) that it would be naive to simply apply all the patches the various vendors release.  Many times different patches from different vendors conflict, and often patches themselves contain problems. Take a look at this Network World blog article: Half of Microsoft patches have problems.

So patches must be tested and evaluated.  And they must be tested quickly.  We know that especially for security patches, their release means that vulnerabilities are published.  And exploits can show up in less than a day.

But testing patches is hard.

You can test patches in one of two ways.  Schedule a down-time (usually off-hours), apply the patches, and have your users run through tests to make sure that the production applications are functioning fine.  The down-time must be scheduled for enough time to roll-back in case a problem is discovered.  This approach may be fine if your business can afford down-time and your team can be scheduled to work during that down-time.

A better approach would be to test the patches in a test environment which is "just like" the production environment.  This approach will allow your team to do the testing without disrupting production (and during normal business hours).  But creating and maintaining such a test environment is costly and difficult.  The environment will immediately be out of sync the moment it is created, and unless there is a new patch every day, such dedicated environments will be extremely under-utilized.

Thin Capture lets you validate patches non-disruptively.

With Thin Capture, you can have the ideal test environment without the usual cost associated with such an environment.  Your team can spin up a test environment for a particular application quickly and on-demand.   And because it is so easy to spin up a test environment, there is no need to keep it around, taking up resources like storage.  With Thin Capture, multiple application environments can share the same set of resources for their test environments.  For any single environment, once the testing is complete, a click of a buttom will release all the allocated resources back into the shared resource pool.