Why is keeping your software up to date important?

By Mark Phillips ¦ Blog.TotalAV.com ¦

Why is this happening again? That pesky pop-up message telling you to update your OS software is staring at you, begging for you to make a choice: “update now” or “remind me later”. What do you do? You choose the ever-tempting “remind me later” option, but we all know what that means. That’s why we are here to tell you why keeping your software up-to-date is an important consideration, especially when you are running a website or server. And how it affects security, usability, and compatibility with other software.

Security Vulnerabilities
First and foremost, updates keep you safe from known security system holes. This is especially very important when there is a new release update available for software you use because most change logs and update notes reveal previously-known exploits that have been patched already. Public knowledge of these exploits leaves your application easy prey for malicious users who are out to exploit these known issues. Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal are a common target simply because of the massive market they hold. Not securing these by updating leaves your system open to compromise making your useful software vulnerable.

Better-Functionality
Updating your software will frequently provide you with feature and speed enhancements. For example, recent updates to WordPress have improved it with the addition of user theme management, contextual searches, and even the ability to manage your multiple sites from one control panel. And updates to look forward to including improved stability and it even MySQL functionality as well!

Squashing-Bugs
When you begin working on a brand with some new piece of software or are operating on the most updated CMS, you are at the highest functionality available. As more of the software users begin providing feedback and through the continuation of the development of the software, bugs start to appear. This is where updates come into play, to fix the bugs and provide you more efficient software with optimized performance.
Maintaining the health of your website or system is crucial and it’s as simple as pressing “update” next time that pop-up notification is blinking at your screen. Professional-grade web hosting service providers continually upgrade their hosting infrastructure with an outdated CMS or website code may not operate properly with the patches that implemented by the host. As such, maintaining the health of your website code is too crucial, and one or two easy steps is updating your underlying CMS as soon as updates are made available. So as soon we know that, it’s really very important to update your old system software and update with the most recent firmware or system update.