Over the last several years the explosion of vulnerabilities across all platforms and the shrinking exploit window has left traditional IT security and IT operations teams in a bit of a quandary.

Historically the two teams have been separated by a line akin to the one between church and state. The IT security team is tasked with ferreting out an increasing number of vulnerabilities that could potentially leave the infrastructure exposed. Once they've come up with their laundry list of problems they lob them over the fence to IT operations on the other side. IT operations is then asked to address these issues in between all of the other day-to-day activities involved in keeping the infrastructure running. That may have worked in the past, but today's problem is that security's laundry list continues to lengthen. Over the last three years Windows vulnerabilities have increased by 75 percent and Macintosh holes have skyrocketed by 228 percent, according to research done by McAfee. Meanwhile, the countdown to fix these flaws has been shaved to nearly nil.