The price of patching

Patching and software updates are now an unavoidable aspect of modern IT usage. Users are all too accustomed to seeing related messages appearing, and software providers seem to have no qualms about releasing them on a regular basis. However, this raises the question of whether it has become too routine an expectation, and whether it is realistic to believe that people will actually keep up with the patch status of their systems. The exploitation of unpatched systems remains a serious risk to IT and the underlying cause of many incidents. Yet, despite advances in automated patching, managing updates can still remain a challenge. As well as the sheer number of updates, other factors, such as limited bandwidth, can discourage people from patching as often as they should. Steven Furnell, Johan van Niekerk and Nathan Clarke consider these problems, paying specific attention to the issues that can be introduced for systems located in developing countries.