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New Cyber Hygiene Report Uncovers a Patching Dilemma in AmericaNew research released today from Automox, the cloud-native cyber hygiene platform provider, in partnership with AimPoint Group has uncovered that less than 50 percent of organizations can patch vulnerable systems swiftly enough to protect against critical threats and zero-day attacks, and 81 percent have suffered at least one data breach in the last two years. The research, titled The 2020 Cyber Hygiene Report: What You Need to Know Now, surveyed 560 IT operations and security professionals at enterprises with between 500 and 25,000 employees, across more than 15 industries to benchmark the state of endpoint patching and hardening. While most enterprises want to prioritize patching and endpoint hardening, they are inhibited by the pace of digital transformation and modern workforce evolution, citing difficulty in patching systems belonging to mobile employees and remote offices, inefficient patch testing, lack of visibility into endpoints, and insufficient staffing in SecOps and IT operations to successfully do so.
Missing Patches and Configurations are at the Center of Data Breaches
With missing patches and configurations cited more frequently than such high-profile issues as insider threats (26%), credential theft (22%), and brute force attacks (17%), three of the four most common issues can be addressed simply with better cyber hygiene.
Enterprises Are Not Patching Fast Enough, Especially When it Comes to Zero-Days
With cyber hygiene, endpoints need to be scanned and assessed on a regular basis, and if problems are found, promptly patched or reconfigured. Automation dramatically speeds up cyber hygiene processes by enabling IT operations and SecOps staff to patch and harden more systems with less effort, while reducing the amount of system and application downtime needed for patching and hardening. Organizations that have fully automated endpoint patching and hardening are outperforming others in basic cyber hygiene tasks.
The Modern Workforce Presents a Cyber Hygiene Dilemma
These patterns can be explained by the fact that most existing patch management tools don't work well with cloud-based endpoints, and that virtual systems are very dynamic and therefore harder to monitor and protect than physical ones. "We are unquestionably in the midst of a major patching dilemma which is getting increasingly worse by the day as the number of enterprise endpoints - and the typical enterprise attack surface - is growing at unprecedented rates and making it nearly impossible for organizations to keep up," said Automox CEO Jay Prassl. "Our 2020 Cyber Hygiene Report shows a very strong correlation between automation and the ability to patch endpoints faster and proactively harden them more frequently than typical legacy systems allow. Organizations that prioritize cyber hygiene through these methods reduce risk across the enterprise, lower IT costs, and accelerate their business transformation." To download a copy of The 2020 Cyber Hygiene Report: What You Need to Know Now please visit: automox.com/lp/2020-cyber-hygiene. To learn more about how Automox empowers organizations to accelerate cyber resiliency, visit www.automox.com.
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