IT decision makers (ITDMs) expressed concerns about the resources available and allotted to them for addressing cybersecurity threats and meeting current and future business demands, according to new research from Intermedia.
The Index surveyed 350 ITDMs, statistically measuring IT confidence levels on a 10-point scale (where zero represents “not confident at all” and 10 represents “extremely confident”). Questions spanned across four topic categories – security, general IT services, infrastructure and skilled IT workforce.
Jonathan Levine, CTO at Intermedia, thinks that, given the critical role IT plays in underpinning business today, a confidence score of 7.2 is worrisome.
Levine says, ‘You wouldn’t feel comfortable boarding an airplane if the pilot had a 7.2 confidence level in the plane’s airworthiness. This modest confidence suggests that organisations may be more exposed than leaders realise. We’ll be watching closely to see if further cloud adoption helps improve confidence, or if the insufficient attention given to IT concerns today will further erode confidence in the coming year.’
Index finds that small companies are struggling the most
Across all four categories, the Index revealed a stark contrast in overall confidence levels with small companies with fewer than 50 employees (confidence score of 5.9) versus medium to large companies, which had higher confidence scores (8.7 and 8.9, respectively). As company size and cloud adoption increased, so did confidence levels.
Michael Gold, CEO of Intermedia, says, ‘Consistently, IT professionals at smaller companies measured as less confident than larger ones, expressing concerns about their ability to protect and support their organisations. This uncertainty presents MSPs with a real opportunity to help SMBs that don’t have the resources to run IT on their own.’
Cyber threats take a toll on confidence. Relative to the Security category, ITDMs were the least confident in their organisation’s ability to prevent, withstand or stop ransomware, botnets and DDoS Attacks.
On average, 56 per cent of internal IT applications currently run in the cloud. 37 per cent of ITDMs expected to increase this number over the next six months.
Relative to infrastructure spending, ITDMs gave an IT confidence score of 6.5 – the lowest of all categories tracked – indicating that companies may not be investing enough.
A third (thirty-three per cent) of ITDMs felt that IT consultants were too hardware focused, and 24 per cent felt that IT consultants weren’t putting enough emphasis on cloud solutions, demonstrating that MSPs and VARs have a long way to go in their cloud transitions to catch up to the market.
Further reading on internet security
