Four reasons you should enable automatic software updates

For better or worse, we need to keep our software regularly updated. Here’s why you should enable automatic software updates.

1. Software is made by humans

Software is created by people who enter series of commands using specific programming languages. And those languages are complex and allow software developers to solve problems in different ways. That means developers can make mistakes or use mistaken assumptions. When a mistake is found, the software needs to be fixed. And those fixes are sent to us via software update.

2. Threat actors look for undetected flaws

Threat actors – criminals that look for weaknesses in systems they can exploit for profit – look at software to find ways to exploit weaknesses. Those weaknesses are not necessarily faults in the software but aspects of a program that can be exploited maliciously in ways developers never anticipated. When those vulnerabilities are discovered they are fixed and distributed via software update.

3. New features

Many software companies enhance their products, adding new features and options. Historically, new features were bundled up and released in new versions of applications. Today, we can take advantage of new features as they are created when developers release them. Often, software updates add new functions and features as well as fixing issues.

4. Flattening the learning curve

When new versions of applications are released, there’s an inevitable learning curve as we discover new features and create new ways of doing things. When we take regular software updates and features are added incrementally rather than monolithically we can adapt with greater ease. Smaller, regular updates make it easier to assimilate and adapt to change.