Updates – Enterprise Style “International Technology Upgrade Week”

We posted this over at the Wordpress blog, but wanted to make sure everyone could check it out.
Server and desktop upgrades were a slow going part of the ancient past. (Ancient meaning three years ago.) Today, without the process of constant upgrading and patching, an enterprise could immediately fall prey to endless infections, which in turn leads to identification theft, intellectual property theft, and the potential for the complete demise of a business, let alone a simple deadline.
To underscore the importance of these updates, Adobe, Skype and others banded together earlier this year to express the importance of these regular updates.
Linda Summers at Skype blog posted this article explaining how infrequently people upgrade their machines. This study is just as important for enterprise environments as it is for a person use policy.

Infographic by Skype

Adobe Bloggers also wrote a specific blog post about International Technology Upgrade Week and the findings of this study. The blog post explains:

Earlier today, Skype—joined by Norton by Symantec and TomTom—kicked off “International Technology Upgrade Week,” a global initiative to encourage consumers to regularly download and install software updates. We’d like to chime in and express our support for this important initiative. Keeping software up-to-date is probably the single-most important advice we can give to users—consumers and businesses alike.
In preparation for International Technology Upgrade Week, Skype commissioned a survey of American, British and German consumers, which revealed the following findings:

• 40 percent of adults don’t always update software on their computers when initially prompted to do so.
• Approximately one quarter of those surveyed said they don’t clearly understand what software updates do, and an equal percentage don’t understand the benefits of updating.
• While 75 percent of adults receive update notifications from their software, more than half admitted that they needed to see a prompt between two and five times before downloading and installing the update.

Also wanted to mention the Norton Blog posting concerning the event as well. Marian Merritt posted in their community forums this article, and mention this warning:

Or consider Norton security software as another example; it simply can’t do its job defending you against the newest threats or latest viruses unless you allow the automatic updating feature to do its work. In fact, helping you keep your software up-to-date is such a big deal at Norton that starting this fall, our engineers have figured out how to make it all happen in the background, silently, and without having to restart your computer for new features to take effect. Keeping you safe with the latest protection is priority #1!