What are the benefits of using IIS on top of Coldfusion?

Question

My team is planning a series of security updates. In this, someone asked the question of it if was necessary to keep IIS as the service hosting Coldfusion. Every CF setup I have ever developed for has used IIS, but dammit, Jim, I'm a developer, not a server admin (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night). We're operating on CF11, plan to update to CF2016 (or whatever the next version is when it is released), so whatever version of Tomcat that comes with the system would be used if we switched back.

Can anybody explain what we gain by using IIS to operate the service?

Answer 1

Beyond the benefits that others are mentioning in the comments, I know that prior to ColdFusion 10 the Adobe documentation explicitly stated that the built-in web server (JRun) was not intended for production use - About web servers in ColdFusion

The web server is a critical component in your ColdFusion environment, and understanding how ColdFusion interacts with web servers can help you administer your site. ColdFusion provides the following web server options:

Built-in web server A lightweight, all-Java, HTTP 1.0 web server. Suitable for development but not intended for use in production applications. For more information, see Using the built-in web server.

External web server A customized web server connector module that forwards requests for ColdFusion pages from an external web server to ColdFusion. For more information, see Using an external web server.

That same document from Adobe has changed slightly with the newer versions but it still reads to me like the built-in web server (Tomcat) is not intended for production use - Web Server Management

The ColdFusion server configuration is built on top of Tomcat, also called the built-in web server. The built-in web server is useful in the following cases:

Coexistence/transition The built-in web server lets you run a previous version of ColdFusion (using an external web server) and ColdFusion (using the built-in web server) on the same computer while you migrate your existing applications to ColdFusion.

Development If your workstation runs ColdFusion but does not run an external web server, you can still develop and test ColdFusion applications locally through the built-in web server. ...

Whenever possible, configure your external web server as part of the ColdFusion installation, except for the two cases mentioned previously (coexistence with a previous ColdFusion version, and when the computer has no web server).