Perhaps less well known due to vendor marketing efforts, it needs ongoing monitoring and maintenance. If it is important enough to implement, it should be important enough to devote sufficient manpower resources to it to take care of it properly. Without this care, the server may not remain in operation long, it may not preserve the confidentiality and integrity of resident data and accounts, or it may be used as a base of operations for criminal activity including attacks on other computers. Budget planning, hiring procedures, staffing, and job descriptions should reflect the need for this maintenance. It is impossible to provide absolute security for our computers just as it is impossible to provide absolute security in the physical world.
Insecurity is a fact of life.
There are no technical panaceas. Accordingly, we must temper our actions with awareness and take some precautions. Your particular computer may not seem to be a desirable target of a compromise attempt but any computer is attractive as a stepping stone or attack vehicle . In the days of standalone computers, reckless or unauthorized use of a computer just affected one computer. With a networked computer and its access to shared network resources and common communications lines, the same actions may affect many computers, accounts, services, or people.