# Peyman Haigh

System specialist

**Organization:** Salem State University  
**Location:** USA  
**Sector:** Education

Higher education runs on an academic calendar, not a business one, and that plays a significant role in how their IT teams operate. Orientation, finals, and registration periods create de facto change freezes, where even brief downtime can disrupt exams, grades, or tuition payments. Add a mix of legacy administrative systems, research computing, and student-facing services, plus IT teams that are often small relative to the number of systems they support, and patch management becomes a constant balancing act between security urgency and academic continuity.

In this chapter, we sit down with Peyman Haigh, systems specialist at Salem State University. He walks us through how his team adjusts its risk tolerance around the academic calendar, what a typical Patch Tuesday looks like, how a small team avoids burnout, and which skills he thinks will matter most as automation takes on more of the routine work.

![Peyman Haigh](https://cdn.manageengine.com/sites/meweb/images/patch-management/images/chapter-2-peyman-haigh.png)

## How do peak academic windows, like finals or syllabus week, change your risk tolerance for patching? When a critical vulnerability drops during a change freeze, how do you handle the emergency approval process?

Our goal is to minimize any downtime during orientation, finals, and peak academic windows. We reschedule our patching and any changes that require downtime during those windows.

However, If there is a critical patch released or a critical change is needed, we will research the severity and provide our recommendation to our CIO who makes the final decision to either wait or inform the community and plan the downtime to implement the changes quickly.

ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus has made it very easy for us to install emergency patches quickly on many servers. We can easily select our servers in the Patch Manager Plus web portal and schedule when to apply the patches.

## Walk us through your Patch Tuesday preparation. What do you do the week before, the day before, and the morning of?

We notify our faculty and staff about our systems being patched on Tuesday night and ask them to notify us if they see any issue the day after. We review the released patches Tuesday morning to make sure we are aware of possible problems that patching could cause.

We have setup automated jobs in Patch Manager Plus that would patch our servers Tuesday night and reboot them. On Wednesday morning we monitor all of our servers and applications to make sure no issue.

Patch Manager Plus has a very useful GUI that shows exactly what servers have been patched and what servers still need patching. We then plan patching the remaining servers and notify the required users. We can select all those servers through the GUI and set them to patch and reboot.

## What's usually the very first sign that a rollout is starting to go sideways?

We have a large number of faculty, staff, and students using our systems, so if a system becomes unavailable, we get notified very quickly. We patch the majority of our systems on Tuesday night after patches get released, and we actively monitor systems and user access the next day.

We have had occasional problems as a result of patching a server and we have resolved it by actively working with the staff supporting the application running on the server.

Patch Manager Plus has built in support for patching many applications but we currently only use it for OS patching. We are exploring adding application patching using Patch Manager Plus and hoping that using that feature would eliminate occasional problems we are seeing after patching.

## In a small higher education IT team where everyone wears multiple hats, how do you balance routine patching against unexpected, high-priority fires without burning out your staff?

This was a big problem for us before using Patch Manager Plus. We have only three staff supporting over 200 servers in a VmWare/Nutanix environment, responsible for setup, OS installation, and securing all these servers and working with the application team to resolve all issues on those servers.

In the past, we had to find time every month to manually login to all these servers and patch and reboot them one by one. Using Patch Manager Plus, we have automated almost everything and need minimal time for the patching process.

We have only the PeopleSoft environment and a few other servers that we patch manually, but we are exploring ways to automate those servers also through Patch Manager Plus.

## As AI handles more routine deployments, what's a patch management skill that will matter more in the next few years?

One of the required skills is backup and recovery which is knowing how to create system snapshots and execute rollback procedures if a patch fails.

Although a lot of processes are being automated using AI and patch management applications, qualified staff are still needed to monitor the process and to intervene when conflicts rise as a result of patching.

Learning a patch management software such as Patch Manager Plus, is the most crucial skill that can save time significantly in the patching process.