How good is your IT staff at staying current when it comes to applying all the latest security patches? Unfortunately, the answer for most businesses is, “probably not as good as you think.”

According to research conducted by Bitdefender, a staggering 64 percent of un-patched vulnerabilities discovered on corporate networks in 2020 involve bugs that date back to 2018 and before.

This mind blowing statistic has serious implications for your company, no matter what business you’re in, and no matter how large or small your firm might be.

What the key finding means, in a nutshell, is that of the US businesses with one or more un-patched piece of code running on their network, there are fixes available for nearly two thirds of them. Worse, those fixes have literally been available for years. Not taking advantage of them is, from the perspective of a hacker, like leaving a neon sight above the front door of your business that reads, “we don’t lock up at night – please, come in and steal from us!”

Everyone in the industry knows and understands that keeping up with all the latest patches for the software deployed across even a small network can be both frustrating and time consuming. It’s certainly not one of the more glamorous aspects of the job.

Even so, it is absolutely critical, and it pays to do a periodic survey of all the software installed on your network and how long it’s been since a security patch was applied. If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to bolster the security of your company’s network, making sure all the latest software security updates are installed should be your first stop.

Even if that’s all you wind up doing, taking that one simple step will dramatically improve the overall security of your network, and that’s a very good thing.