[spongle]

Our senior tech guys do the patch Tuesday meeting but a big chunk of our kit is internet facing. If you're offline or behind a (decent content filtering) firewall then the impact is potentially lower or non existent.

Impact analysis is essential to discover whether or not the issue is serious.

Our dev team use powershell for all sorts of things from data processing and clean up to fuzzing. It's great because it tries to preserve both the Unix semantics and introduce and object model which means it bridges the world of raw data and COM etc which has traditionally been pretty sticky. It can be quite slow in some circumstances though which is my only concern (this is usually due to the fact strings are immutable on the CLR). I used python for a bit as well but it doesn't hit the spot for COM.

regarding cost, the only major issue for us is SQL Server licensing but we argued with them and waved a postgresql server around and got a hefty discount ;)

We don't use Azure at all mainly due to security concerns (we store financial data). I use it for a couple of side projects as it's cheaper than a couple of dedicated servers.

I've not encountered any major trust issues with Azure despite the whole NSA controversy. I don't get much love for OSS other than from people who want to cut costs and they usually don't pay up.