11 December 2018
More than a third of IT teams leave it up to individual employees to install updates on their work devices and machines, according to Kollective.
For its State of Software Distribution report, the content delivery specialist surveyed 260 IT managers, leaders and decision makers in the UK and US.
It reveals that 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.
The research found that 66 per cent of IT teams are not yet able to automate the distribution of updates, while 34 per cent of large enterprises say that they struggle to distribute updates over their networks. Kollective believes this issue could be solved through the use of an SDN.
However, its report says only 18 per cent of IT managers see the adoption of this technology as a priority before 2020.
The study also highlights the potential security risks involved in leaving individual employees to install updates – 35 per cent of IT managers say they don’t trust employees to run updates, and 37 per cent list ‘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.
“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,” says CEO Dan Vetras.
“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.”