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Business News/ Technology / News/  Nearly 50% of global entities using ageing, obsolete networking devices: Report
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Nearly 50% of global entities using ageing, obsolete networking devices: Report

Obsolete devices have, on an average, twice as many vulnerabilities per device (42.2) than ageing (26.8) and current devices (19.4)

Ageing and obsolete devices create security vulnerabilities and put businesses at risk of cyberattacks. (Photo: Reuters)Premium
Ageing and obsolete devices create security vulnerabilities and put businesses at risk of cyberattacks. (Photo: Reuters)

NEW DELHI: As the world takes stock of issues brought on by covid-19 that can impact the future of digital journey, a 2020 Global Network Insights report by NTT Ltd has found that 47.9% of global organisations' network infrastructure assets were ageing or obsolete in 2019 compared with 13.1% in 2017.

Organizations in the technology sector which are usually the first to adopt new products are the most affected. Due to early adoption of cloud infrastructure, the sector's percentage of ageing and obsolete devices was also high at 59.6% in 2019.

The only other sector that is ahead is the public sector with 61.7% ageing and obsolete devices.

Healthcare (52.5%), energy & utilities (51.9%) and retail & wholesale (49.1%) are the other three sectors with high percentage of such devices, above the industry average of 47.9%.

The report also dwells on the security risks that obsolete devices pose to an organisation.

Ageing and obsolete devices create security vulnerabilities and put businesses at risk of cyberattacks. The growing use of open and co-working spaces and the existence of obsolete devices exacerbates the risks.

It is because obsolete devices have, on an average, twice as many vulnerabilities per device (42.2) than ageing (26.8) and current devices (19.4).

In the last one year, the share of current devices has decreased across all five regions that were covered under the report. The decrease was highest in Australia region with 58.1% decline compared to 2018. As a result, Australia had the lowest percentage of current devices (29.8%).

Asia Pacific region saw a decline of 28.8% from 2018 and it's percentage of current devices in use is 53.7%.

The report added, in a different vein, that managing environments more proactively reduces operational complexity and cost allowing organisations to prioritise resources towards more business critical technologies and even resolve critical outages faster. Organisations that have used automation and machine learning can further reduce the number of critical, business impacting incidents by 10.5% year-on-year.

It was found that software bugs have decreased by 17.7% compared to 2017, indicating that manufacturers are becoming more mature in their software development practices. However, configuration errors have increased 5.2% compared to 2017, indicating a growing skills gap in organisations’ ability to accurately configure complex networking infrastructure.

NTT conducted assessments of over 808,428 network devices in 5 regions and across multiple industry sectors.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abhijit Ahaskar
Abhijit writes on tech policy, gaming, security, AI, robotics, electronics and startups. He has been in the media industry for over 12 years.
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Published: 09 Jun 2020, 03:53 PM IST
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