Microsoft has urged its customers to keep their on-premises Exchange servers patched by applying the latest supported Cumulative Update (CU) so they are always ready to deploy an emergency security update.
The company recommends always running the Exchange Server Health Checker script after installing updates. This helps in detecting common configuration issues that are commonly known to cause performance issues that can however be fixed with a simple Exchange Environment configuration change.
"To defend your Exchange servers against attacks that exploit known vulnerabilities, you must install the latest supported CU (as of this writing, CU12 for Exchange Server 2019, CU23 for Exchange Server 2016, and CU23 for Exchange Server 2013) and the latest SU (as of this writing, the January 2023 SU)," The Exchange Team said.
"Exchange Server CUs and SUs are cumulative, so you only need to install the latest available one. You install the latest CU, then see if any SUs were released after the CU was released. If so, install the most recent (latest) SU."
Exchange admins were also asked by Microsoft to offer info on how the Exchange Server update process could be improved via an "update experience survey."
"The purpose of this survey is to understand your Exchange Server cumulative update (CU) and security update (SU) experiences so that we can look for ways to improve the experiences and help you keep your servers up to date," the company says.
"The information collected in this survey will be used only by the Exchange Server engineering team at Microsoft and only to improve the update experiences."