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More than half of IT pros that indicated security issues were their top concern specified breaches, malware, vulnerabilities and zero day attacks as their biggest challenge, according to a survey by Ipswitch.
The 2,685 IT professionals polled indicated that the top challenges for IT teams in the year ahead include security (25 percent), network and application performance and monitoring (19 percent) and new technology (14 percent).
New technology, updates and deployment (14 percent), time, budget and resource constraints (10 percent) and business issues (7 percent) were also major concerns for those surveyed.
“The most pressing concern from IT pros is dealing with new technology. While it holds a lot of promise, there is complexity in learning how to deploy and use new technology and keep it current,” Jeff Loeb, chief marketing officers at Ipswitch, told eWEEK. “The overall technology stack gets more complicated, not less, every time something is added to it. Tied to this is the management of end user devices. As an example, wearable devices have reached the 50 percent penetration plateau in most organizations, but only one in three companies have a policy in place to deal with these devices. That’s an invitation for network chaos.”
Security will undeniably be a top priority for the foreseeable future as more complexity within IT environments creates more vulnerability and weakness, which is why vendors need to create technology that is simple to use in order to remove complexity and reduce risk, Loeb explained.
Moving data safely from one location to another both inside and outside of the organization was the second leading response within the security category, following general security issues such as breaches, malware, vulnerabilities and zero day attacks.
Data management and storage (6 percent), device management and end user issues (5 percent) and automation and reporting (4 percent) rounded out the top eight major issues covered in the report.
All regions of the globe were represented in the survey results and broke down the following way: North America was the largest sample size with 61 percent, followed by the EMEA region at 24 percent.
Asia-Pacific accounted for 12 percent of all survey respondents while the Latin American/South American market was represented by 3percent.
“We expect budgets to rise nominally in the year to come, but not nearly at the same rate as the increase in IT complexity,” Loeb said. “As a result, IT pros are in a real tough position to figure out how do more with less.”