If you want to understand why your IT security is so important, it will help if you understand the differences between patches and upgrades. Some vulnerabilities will appear in your IT security from time to time, and patching those vulnerabilities is imperative in order to defend your IT systems against outside hackers and attacks.
Taking care of patches and updates is a lot easier than handling data breaches, and yet a lot of people will put off fixing and patching their systems.
This is the wrong way to go about IT security. If you want to make sure that your IT systems are secure, then you need to embrace the inconvenience of patching those vulnerabilities. While you may find system updates an annoyance, they are a must if you want your business to remain as tightly secure against external interruption as possible.
There is a difference between patches and upgrades, and it’s important to understand that difference.
Upgrades
Your IT managed service provider issues software upgrades, and they do so for a number of reasons. Not only do upgrades happen to fix performance bugs, but they also occur for new features and other improvements, too.
Most people don’t upgrade their software as often as they should, which means that they are leaving their systems vulnerable to attack without even knowing it! Most upgrades are intended to solve security issues, but when people skip those upgrades, their IT system is far less secure.
Updates are far more than just annoying pop-ups that interrupt what you’re doing while you work. If you continue to ignore those, you will be leaving your data vulnerable to cybercriminals with malicious intentions.
You need to be careful here, as the last thing you need is to ignore the upgrades to your IT security and then find that your information has been stolen. You can postpone upgrades, although you really shouldn’t, but you should never postpone patches.
Patches
Patches are specific to addressing particular vulnerabilities in your IT security. These weaknesses in your operating systems of software can invite malware and viruses in, and those vulnerabilities are then exploited, which is something you want to avoid!
Unless you patch it, you will be open to attack because your system is left unprotected. It’s not ideal, and patches can prevent you from being left open. A software upgrade may be specific to security, but a patch is a little more than that. Most of the data breaches that pop up in the media can be traced right back to vulnerabilities that are left unpatched, and so can your software issue.
If you keep up with those patches and don’t postpone them, you can save your business from a whole lot of trouble and money loss. Automated solutions will ensure that the vulnerability patching is streamlined. You can ensure that the right updates are deployed to each network device you own. You need to keep a clean house, and you can do that with the timely patches and upgrades as they are required, whether they are inconvenient or not.