Scanners already effectively give this, finding the vulnerable components and a list of CVEs. But it may be difficult, expensive, or too time consuming to upgr

Scanners already effectively give this, finding the vulnerable components and a list of CVEs. But it may be difficult, expensive, or too time consuming to upgrade the affected components. Or there may be blackout periods (e.g. during open enrollment for many healthcare companies) where they basically can't make any changes to the production stack. The problems with upgrades are usually centered around testing and understanding the changes and ensuring that things still work. It often requires more resources, especially time & developers, than may be available at any given time. And some companies treat all IT functions as cost centers and you can see this from how they run the place: the internal people don't know their own setup very well and may not have much experience in general, things are run by a tiny number of people who may have multiple roles to fill, etc. Source: I've helped many people in many industries upgrade complex, security-sensitive enterprise software that interfaces with large amounts of their infrastructure.