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So just how have today’s enterprises ended up so out of date?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.