I was wondering what the general consensus was in regard to upgrading switch/routers to the newest version of IOS released?
I know everyone has their own opinions on the matter. I have been a Network Engineer (Cisco centric) for over 20 years, so im sure recommendations have changed over time. It seems like new vulnerabilities are always being discovered, whether they are low, med, high, etc. The security team where I am currently working is requesting us to upgrade everytime a new vunerability is released, regardless of the severity (or if it really even pertains to our configurations). We are at the point where we are basically upgrading as soon as a new version is released and it's taking a lot of time and resources.
In the past at other employers, we typically didn't go to a new version for at least 3-6 months after it was released, and also had to provide a justification for the upgrade, whether the new code had a feature we wanted to implement, or we ran into a bug, or there was a critical vulnerability in the current version we were running. We never just upgraded for the sake of having the latest version available. However, I am basing this off the past, so maybe best practices have changed regarding software management.
Just curious on other opinions out in the field and how they navigate their internal upgrade processes.
