Data security finished second behind legacy systems hampering growth and innovation with 40% of all respondents indicating that firms are continuing to battle with outdated and inefficient systems.
The study that consisted of more than 900 small to medium businesses (firms of up to 5,000 employees) were categorised into four sections of IT management maturity, aligned/strategic, proactive, efficient and reactive. The survey surprisingly revealed that only 17% of IT executives believed that their company was in the aligned/strategic section.
IT Management and maintenance costs proved to be an especially challenging area for the IT department this year among firms deemed to be at the ‘efficient’ level, registering as the main concern for 44% of respondents. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the data driven era, the need for more data and storage management was also rated as an important issue in 2017 for the modern IT department.
The study also delved into a business’s outsourcing choices, providing an interesting insight into the most popular outsourcing choice and the growing trends in this area. Backup and recovery was the top selection with 36% of total respondents while server support and network connectivity also polled high on the list.
“One of the primary reasons for conducting our annual survey of SMB and midmarket enterprises was to analyse the IT maturity in both large and small businesses. It is important to understand that businesses of all sizes can benefit from IT maturity, enabling decisions to be made on a more informed basis. Firms must begin to harness all the new technology that is available to them, especially in terms of data security with the impending GDPR regulation on the horizon” said Taunia Kipp, global senior vice president of marketing for Kaseya.
The research also indicated that smaller companies were much more likely to be classed as taking a reactive approach to IT, with 41% of respondents in businesses with 101-500 employees being identified as reactive. Further to this, it was interesting to note that within these smaller IT departments 28% of those polled believed that a Director would be responsible for making crucial IT decisions. In comparison, 45% of employees among aligned/strategic firms labelled the CIO / VP as the primary IT decision maker, indicating a clear IT structure within the business.
