We talk about it quite often with our customers, about why it is important, how often it should be done, and how much it can save in the long run. Not everyone jumps on board right away, sometimes waiting till disaster strikes before taking action.
I’m talking about preventive maintenance, taking care of problems before they become serious.
Maintenance for your computer is similar to maintenance for your car; change the oil and filter, check the fluids, change other stuff if the time is right. While you don’t have fluids to change in your computer (unless it’s liquid cooled), there are plenty of filters to run through your system to see what needs to be updated and cleaned out.
One of the tools we use during our scheduled maintenance’s is a benchmarking program from a company named Secunia called Personal Software Inspector (there is a commercial version too: Corporate Software Inspector). This tool is utilized to check a system to determine what programs are installed, what the version of those programs are, and compare the findings to what is considered up-to-date and supported versions for that program.
By taking these details and working them together with a bunch of factors (vulnerabilities in the program versions, impact of those vulnerabilities, likelihood of attack, etc), PSI comes up with a score for a computer (0 to 100, 100 being no issues). PSI also lists all those programs it found and provides links and shortcuts to downloading the latest version or the most recent update for the current version so that a user can get their computer updated and can hit that perfect 100 score mark.
But naturally, like most benchmark programs, PSI does send data back to Secunia for number crunching and analysis. And what they’ve come up with are reports with lots of figures and percentages. And they don’t do this just for everyone; they’ve even broken it down by country.
And without further delay, here is the link to the 4th Quarter report of 2013 for the United States.
And here is the US’s report home page, which includes links to Q3 2013, Q2 2013, Q1 2013, and Q4 2012.
For those interested in other countries, here you go (click on a flag to access reports for a specific country).
And while you’re there, go look at the Vulnerability Review 2013 page. It has a bunch of Infographic’s containing interesting details on various patch and vulnerability topics.
Finally, if you don’t want to wait till a problem strikes to get things fixed, contact us to schedule your next maintenance.
