The State of Patch Management in the Digital Workplace
663 IT practitioners report patching paralysis is undermining their organizations’ security posture.
Research from Adaptiva, in partnership with the Ponemon Institute, paints a grim picture of the state of enterprise patching. Bandwidth limitations, lack of visibility, pace of deployments, and the inordinate number of applications companies have installed on their devices create an insurmountable problem for IT.
Respondents report that detecting vulnerabilities and assessing risk and exposure of applications are two of the hardest parts of patching.
Key Stats:
- 69% report that they don’t know how many applications are installed on their endpoints.
- The average organization has nearly 3,000 applications installed on its endpoints, and that number is only increasing.
- 59% say it takes at least two weeks to begin deployment after a patch has been released, widening the window of opportunity for hackers.
- Only 34% can reliably confirm that a deployed patch has been installed on the appropriate devices.
- 44% of patches are handled with an ad-hoc approach, and only 31% are distributed using automation, leaving humans to manage the entire process and repeat mundane tasks.
Organizations continue to struggle using legacy tools and pseudo-automation solutions. They are looking to minimize manual oversight, which is now possible with a fully autonomous solution. These solutions can alleviate manual tasks by modeling business environments and processes to tailor to a wide range of requirements. The future of patching is zero-touch always-on patch management, and that future is here.