Part III of III
Now, how about third-party applications such as Adobe and Java (just to name a few), what patching methods are in place for these applications? These products come with vulnerabilities of their own and unfortunately there is no easy way to keep these products updated as there is no industry standard which forces a vendor to have an enterprise level updater. In other words, they don’t have a central management tool to manage their patches and to ensure each individual computer running these applications are compliant. This has caused another challenge for many organizations and system administrators.
How much time, resources and capital should I invest to ensure all my third-party applications are kept up to date with the latest security updates? Well ask yourself: How much is my data worth? How would it impact my business and/or clients if my network data leaked to the hacker world? If we refer to the Risk Management formula: (Rate of occurrence multiplied by the impact of the event equals risk) and consider that according to many security companies and even the FBI, cybercrime is escalating at an unimaginable rate. For example, just from 2008 to 2009, the FBI received 336,655 complaints of cybercrimes which was a 22.3% increase from 2008 and this has ended up costing over $500 million in losses to cybercrime (these numbers have increased even more in recent months). Without a doubt, the risk is extremely high!
So how can we overcome this challenge? Investing in additional tools to manage updates for all of our third-party applications and using compliance tools to determine if our network is truly up to par. As a result, Compuquip has seen it prudent to invest in additional resources and tools to provide these additional security measures to continue fighting against cybercrime. Our new Level 2 Patch Management offering will help reduce even further our client’s risk of data loss. For more information regarding our new third-party application updates offering, please contact your Technical Account Manager.
Return to Part II of this series, Our Experience with Patching.
