More than a third of enterprise IT departments leave it up to employees to install security updates, claims a ‘State of Software Distribution’ report from enterprise content delivery company Kollective.
Kollective’s report, which incorporates research from 260 IT managers, leaders and decision makers, highlights how bandwidth issues and poor IT infrastructure have resulted in a number of large enterprises relying on individual employees to keep their systems up-to-date and secure.
According to the research, 66% of enterprise IT teams are not yet able to automate the distribution of updates, while 34% of large enterprises say that they struggle to distribute updates over their networks.
This issue could be solved through the use of a software-defined network, however only 18% of IT managers see the adoption of this technology as a priority before 2020.
The report also highlights the potential security risks involved in leaving individual employees to install updates, with 35% of IT managers saying they don’t trust employees to run updates and 37% listing ‘failure to install updates’ as their biggest security threat in 2018.
Kollective blames this culture of manual updating on the broader issues of poor network infrastructure and ineffective software distribution.
Dan Vetras, CEO of Kollective, stated: “The idea that companies with thousands, or even tens of thousands, of computer terminals are still leaving it up to their employees to manually download and install updates is extremely concerning.
“With organisations increasingly under threat from cyberattacks, it is the responsibility of IT departments to ensure that every device across their networks is up-to-date and secure.
"Unfortunately, with so many companies still running on old network infrastructure, many IT departments simply don’t have the bandwidth needed to distribute these updates at scale and ensure that they are installed by the entire organisation.
"Failure to do so will inevitably leave the door open to the next major enterprise-level cyberattack.”