Mid-Market IT Priorities Report looks at technology risk trends
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- Published: Thursday, 25 April 2019 08:32
Node4 has published its Mid-Market IT Priorities Report, which surveyed 300 mid-market IT decision-makers, including IT managers, CIOs, IT directors and Heads of IT. It identifies how IT leaders in organizations from a range of industries are managing both their existing and new technologies.
Key findings include:
- Budgets are a cause for concern as IT leaders struggle to meet demands. Two thirds (65 percent) of those that believe their 2019 budgets do not go far enough, feel that they would require a budget increase of up to 15 percent to ensure that they are able to meet the needs of their business amidst increasing cyber security concerns.
- Data loss is the biggest concern related to security. 42 percent of respondents stated this was the most difficult challenge they faced when trying to keep their organization secure, while a close second was concerns about data in the cloud not being as rigorously protected (38 percent). A quarter of those asked also believed their cyber security defences would not be adequate if targeted in an attack.
- This year, IT leaders are focusing on security before innovation. Data privacy was the main objective of 42 percent of respondents, followed by business growth (36 percent), and then digital transformation (29 percent).
- Private cloud is continuing to prove a popular choice. 29 percent of IT leaders expect to move their workloads from on-premises to the private cloud this year, while nearly a quarter (24 percent) expect to move from the public cloud to private. However, first time adoption of cloud services was evenly matched between private and public, with 15 percent for each saying they will adopt that solution.
IT leaders challenged by a range of security concerns
As IT teams work to keep businesses safe, a third of respondents (32 percent) highlighted the growing complexity of cyber threats as the biggest strategic security challenge of 2019. Budgets were also flagged as an issue when fighting the growing threat, with maintaining defences / defenses due to cost (22 percent) a key concern. Around one in five respondents believe that finding a cloud provider with enough security experience (18 percent) is their biggest challenge for this year.
Looking more closely at specific risks, the most common concern among respondents was data loss (42 percent), shortly followed by concerns about data in the cloud not being as rigorously protected (38 percent), ransomware attacks (35 percent), maintaining cyber defences on the budget provided (32 percent), concerns that the defences would not be adequate if tested (25 percent), concern due to targeting by cyber criminals in 2018 (24 percent).
Agility is key for cloud workload distribution and migration
Most (54 percent) of respondents have between 21 percent - 50 percent of their workloads in the cloud, but respondents were more likely to have less data in the cloud than more: 0-30 percent cloud utilization accounted for 32 percent of respondents, while 70-100 percent cloud utilization accounted for just 10 percent.
Private cloud is receiving more investment from mid-market businesses. A significant number of respondents are planning to move resources to the private cloud, with almost a third (29 percent) expecting to move workloads from on-premises to the private cloud. In addition, a quarter (24 percent) expect to move workloads from public cloud to private.
However, that’s not to say that public cloud is falling out to favour. 20 percent plan to move workloads from on-premises to public cloud, and 18 percent expect to move from private cloud to public cloud. There is also some data coming back on premises, mostly from private cloud (17 percent), but also from public cloud (15 percent).
First time adoption of cloud remains a significant factor across the research base. Equal percentages (15 percent) plan to adopt the public or private cloud for the first time in 2019.