Over the past 12 months, many organizations have become slightly faster at applying operating system patches on endpoint systems despite the challenges associated with maintaining remote devices, a new report from Absolute Software shows.
Even so, the length of time that enterprise endpoints were out-of-date with available OS patches remained relatively high at 80 days.
"Surprisingly, given the challenges of maintaining remote devices, we actually saw a decrease in the length of time that endpoints were behind in applying the latest OS patches available," says Steven Spadaccini, vice president of global sales engineering at Absolute Software.
Over the past year, even the most sophisticated organizations had a hard time supporting and securing remote workforces. A lack of visibility and control over their entire endpoint environment exacerbated the security challenge for many organizations, he says.
"While a lag of two-plus months is certainly still cause for concern, it is encouraging to see that organizations worked to improve fundamental security hygiene practices even with employees out of the building and off the corporate network," Spadaccini says.
For the report, Absolute analyzed anonymized data from some 5 million devices running the company's software across 13,000 customer sites in North America and Europe. One key takeaway from the analysis was the large proportion of endpoint devices with sensitive data on them. Also of note was the overall increase in the volume of sensitive data on these systems.
Seventy-three percent of the systems overall that Absolute analyzed had at least some sensitive data on them, such as personally identifiable information and protected health information. Devices in the financial services and professional service sectors tended to have substantially more sensitive data o ..
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