(MSPAlliance) – Tuesday, April 18, 2006 – European businesses are largely unaware of how many patches had been applied during the last six months, according to a new McAfee survey. Nearly half of the 600 European IT decision-makers surveyed had no plan for placing priorities on which applications should get patches, while 58 percent did not know how much patches were costing the company.
The survey included companies from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. More than a quarter of respondents said that it took up to 48 hours to apply a patch, while another 20 percent said the process could take up to a week or longer.
Companies have been pressured lately by compliance measures that patching is a leading element in meeting. Though patching is still seen primarily as an administrative task, it has become a problem for many companies. The McAfee report cited 5,198 reported vulnerabilities for 2005, each with the potential to compromise corporate IT security.