It's Friday, the weekend has landed... and Microsoft warns of an Internet Explorer zero day exploited in the wild (Yes, this is IN ADDITION TO all the bad ones in Patch Tuesday)

Bingo. When are companies going to realize keeping up with all the Windows patches is costing them real money, hand over fist?

Allow me to give you a real-life example as the large international bank I work for just completed our annual Technology Roadmap exercise.

When I started at the bank back in 2007, we had 2x the number of Windows Servers than we did Red Hat Linux servers. The number of Windows servers was @ 9,800 and the number of Linux servers was just shy of 5,000.

We now have over 15,000 Linux servers and just under 7,000 Windows servers.

Our Technology Lifecycle Plan that I'd developed when I started with the bank was designed to reduce cost and simplify the number of Operating Systems and version we had in the bank. In 2007 the bank had three different versions of Windows Server and four different versions of Unix and Linux.

We now have two versions of Windows Server and two versions of Unix/Linux. We still have a legacy Solaris environment we're trying to get our business users to move off of and a legacy Windows environment for the same reason.

Our practice on both those legacy OS' has been to isolate and harden them to the point that zero updates to them are available to "entice" business users to move off of them. From a technology standpoint, we don't want to incur any additional risk of running these legacy OS' so that includes zero app code updates and we don't care what the excuse from the business users is.

If you think current Windows OS' are expensive to maintain, the exercise to isolate and security harden legacy ones is even moreso.

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