You can’t go to a software conference, read a tech blog, or curl up in bed with a good industry report these days without some mention of digital transformation. It’s one of those topics that’s frequently mentioned, but rarely defined. When did it start? What does it mean? How will we know when it’s done? For every company, the answer is something different.

However, despite the fact that everyone talks about digital transformation everywhere and all the time, it’s worth keeping in mind that it will likely be over sooner than you think. Consider one industry that has already come out on the other side of this transition: cameras.

For more than hundred years, cameras were just cameras. Once digital cameras came along, the two technologies–film and digital–co-existed side by side for several years. However, these days it’s impossible to find a film camera at your local big box retailer, one-hour photo kiosks have all been turned into drive-thru coffee stands, and not a single person in your office under the age of 27 has ever owned a film camera. The “digital camera” is now the standard.

It will be the same for almost every facet of business. Right now enterprises undergoing digital transformation have one foot in legacy systems and one foot in the cloud. However, as legacy systems reach their end of life, digital will no longer be a choice. It will be the new normal.

As we were researching our 2018 State of Software Distribution Report, we saw this tension between legacy and digital first hand. Many IT leaders are still struggling to distribute content, files and updates across their networks due to an ungainly infrastructure. Legacy systems, along with legacy processes and mindsets, have made it difficult to keep up with the velocity of digital.

Take Windows as an example. Ever since Windows 95, enterprises have had a system in place that revolves around slow, meticulously planned operating system and patch updates. But with Windows 10, Microsoft will be moving users to a Windows as a Service model. Rather than updating the operating system every few years, IT teams will need to manage a constant, continuous stream of updates to their Windows endpoints.

For enterprises used to lengthy test periods and rolling out a patch months after release, their IT teams are going to soon be bogged down in a backload of updates to distribute. According to our research, 45% of enterprises must wait a month or more to install vital security patches. That’s not sustainable for Windows 10 or all the other applications that are moving to a cloud model.
In a sense, software distribution is still stuck in the dark ages. Talking to IT managers, we found that a third of large business struggle to distribute content, files and updates across their networks, while nearly half of IT teams at enterprises with more than 100,000 endpoints said the same thing. In fact, 13% said they’ve given up on trying to enact and manage a systematic software distribution process. Instead, they leave it up to employees to update their own devices. Knowing that a single data breach on a single device can cost your company millions, can you honestly trust that every last employee is going to keep every last device up-to-date and secure? Even Brad in accounts payable?

The good news is that digital transformation is shifting attitudes around software distribution from the dark ages to a distribution renaissance. While only 18% of IT managers see the adoption of an SD ECDN as a priority in 2018, twice as many recognize that a failure to install updates is their greatest security threat. As trends like the cloud, Windows 10, distributed workforces and large content like live video become more of the norm, SD ECDN provides the most promise for scaling large content deliveries and thus improving the reliability of software distribution.

As we consider the state of software distribution in 2018, it’s worth taking a second to think about what the state of software distribution might be ten years from now. If we were able to get our hands on a copy of the 2028 State of Software Distribution Report, we’d see a world where Windows as a Service is a fact of life, everything is on the cloud, and where IoT devices outnumber humans by a factor of thousands. Automated technologies like peering platforms will keep everything secure by ensuring patch delivery while conserving bandwidth. In this future, software distribution will be constant and nearly instantaneous. I don’t know what issues will worry IT leaders in 2028, but I don’t think patching will be one of them.

While that sounds impossible now, just ask the camera industry–a lot can change in ten years. The golden age of software distribution will be here sooner than you think.

While it’s easy to chalk up this Breachpocalypse to the evolving sophistication of cyber criminals, the power of new hacking tools and the difficulty of fighting against an international menace, that doesn’t tell the full story. The real shock behind the numbers is exactly how many breaches could have been prevented with an effective software patching process.

According to the Online Trust Alliance’s Cyber Incident & Breach Trends Report, a stunning 93% of reported breaches were completely avoidable. Regular patching, along with paying close attention to vulnerability reports and training employees to avoid malicious emails, could have saved international businesses and their customers billions of dollars in damage.

Despite the fact that patches are freely available, businesses of all sizes continue to struggle to patch devices across their network not only in the days after a patch is release, but quite often years after. Looking back a few years, the Verizon Data Breach Report 2016 showed that most exploits in 2015 came from vulnerabilities discovered in 2007, while vulnerabilities from as far back as 1999 still accounted for a significant amount of exploits.

No matter which way you measure it, 2017 will be remembered as the Year of the Data Breach. Record highs were hit for almost every type of data breach statistic available:

Looking at 2017, two of the most notable hacks could have been prevented with an effective patching process:

The WannaCry ransomware campaign wreaked worldwide chaos, causing more than $8 billion in losses across more than 100 countries. The patch for the vulnerability exploited by WannaCry was available 59 days before the attack.

Equifax exposed the data of 143 million people, resulting in an estimated $600 million loss of shareholder value, lost business, remediation costs, and fines, not to mention immeasurable brand value and customer trust. In mid-May Equifax confirmed that attackers gained access to its system through a Apache Struts web-application vulnerability that had a patch available in March.

What keeps a company from promptly patching? Often it’s a combination of prioritization coupled with the difficulty effectively distributing patches across the enterprise. But make no mistake; patching is often the only thing keeping your company secure. The more you can keep your patches up to date, the more likely you’ll be protected against the next WannaCry and less likely you’ll become the next Equifax.

Over the last five years, we have seen cyberattacks hit some of the world’s largest organizations. From data breaches at Verifone, TalkTalk and Docusign, to ransomware attacks on FedEx, Honda and the UK’s National Health Service; it’s becoming increasingly clear that businesses at the top of chain are just as vulnerable to cyberattacks as those at the bottom.

But are these attacks the result of poor security systems, or do they stem from something far more fundamental to an organization’s core IT infrastructure? In the case of last year’s WannaCry attack, the devastating breaches were not the result of a lack of security software, but rather a lack of patches, updates and distribution infrastructure. In some cases, the companies affected were found to still be running Windows XP – a 17-year-old operating system that stopped receiving support in April 2014.

But while it’s easy to blame businesses for failing to update, the reality is that – for enterprises with thousands, or even tens of thousands, of machines – staying up to date is easier said than done.

Faced with ever larger and increasingly remote workforces, the ability to distribute updates and ensure the latest software, operating systems and patches are installed is proving especially challenging. Without the bandwidth or infrastructure to effectively distribute these updates, such organizations are left at serious risk – and many of them don’t even know it.

So just how have today’s enterprises ended up so out of date? And what are their IT teams doing to rectify this issue and to provide the necessarily security updates quickly and at scale?

These are the questions that we at Kollective set out to answer when developing our State of Software report for 2018. Calling upon research with over 260 IT professionals across the UK and US, the State of Software Delivery offers comprehensive insights into the impact that network bandwidth, update infrastructure and software delivery practices are having on the modern enterprise.