NISp1-07: Patching Rate Management For Controlled Service-Disruption In Data Centers

We investigate the important problem of patching vulnerabilities in highly utilized data centers with heterogeneous groups of servers. In particular, our goal is to select the patching rate so as to efficiently (if not optimally), balance the trade-off between service disruption and risk exposure due to potential exploitation of vulnerabilities. We formulate the problem using a dynamic programming approach, that captures the aforementioned tradeoff, and study the structural properties of the optimal solution. Furthermore, we focus on insightful special cases and develop low-complexity justified heuristics, which achieve significant performance gains over standard benchmarks. We also demonstrate that the heuristics are very efficient, in the sense that they perform very close to the optimal solution obtained via dynamic programming.