A global survey of 900 IT administrators finds 85% would prefer to have a unified platform for managing devices, identities and access.
Conducted by JumpCloud, the survey finds 60% identifying cybersecurity as their top challenge, followed by nearly half who identified managing too many point solutions and rolling out new services as their top challenge at 47% each.
Nearly half (46%) of respondents also require five to ten tools to manage IT, while more than a quarter (26%) have 11 or more tools, and well over three quarters (39%) are spending 26-50% of their entire IT budget on licensing fees for those tools.
On the plus side, more than three quarters (77%) said they expect their IT budgets to increase in the next 12 months. Top areas for IT spending are cybersecurity tools and services at 48%, followed by IT tools enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) at 42%, cloud infrastructure at 40%, IT service or managed service providers (MSPs) at 37% and IT asset management (ITAM) at 35%. The lowest spending priorities are Zero Trust (16%) and additional headcount (22%).
Chase Doelling, principal strategist for JumpCloud, said the survey makes it clear that even as IT budgets increase, cybersecurity is accounting for a larger percentage of the overall budget. Nearly half (47%) allocate between 10-25% of yearly IT budget toward cybersecurity, while 24% spend 26-50%, the survey finds. Three quarters (75%) expect their cybersecurity budget to increase over the next 12 months.
Not surprisingly, more than half (55%) of respondents are more concerned about cybersecurity than they were six months ago. Nearly half (46%) work for organizations that have experienced a cyberattack, with a third (33%) believing those attacks in part were generated by artificial intelligence (AI). More than two thirds (67%) said they are concerned that the rate at which AI is rising is outpacing their ability to secure against AI-driven threats, even as more than three quarters (77%) work for organizations that plan to implement AI initiatives within the next year.
The biggest roadblock to implementing stronger security controls is additional security measures usually mean poor user experience (46%). Top security concerns are software vulnerability exploits (34%), network attacks (33%), use of unsecured networks (26%) and ransomware (26%). Additionally, only 30% of respondents said they can update critical systems within hours of a patch being released.
More troubling still, 88% of respondents worry about unauthorized applications and devices expanding their attack surface, with 38% admitting they can’t even discover all applications in use. At the same time, 44% of respondents said they are worried about the ability of the MSPs being used to secure IT. More than a third (35%) noted their organizations rely fully on MSPs to manage IT.
Nearly all (98%) respondents said their organization still relies on password-based systems for at least some IT resources and 92% said it’s important for new devices to have biometric capabilities. That’s an increasingly critical requirement in an era where rather than hacking into systems, most cybercriminals are simply logging in using stolen credentials, said Doelling
Despite these concerns, 81% said their organization is confident it is prepared financially to recover from a cyberattack.
On a potentially more positive note, for IT administrators that need to simplify the management of IT, more than half of organizations (57%) now require employees to at some point during the week to be physically in an office, with nearly half (47%) requiring them to be there full time.
On a more sour note, 72% of respondents said they have gone through layoffs or anticipate them over the next six months.
It’s not clear how all these issues and concerns are impacting IT staff morale, but the one thing that is certain is that working in IT has never been more challenging.
