Nearly one-third (32%) of IT group employees in SMBs and mid-market enterprises globally said their organisation had experienced a security breach in the past five years, with at least 10% of the total sample of respondents reporting that they were hit by a breach in the past year. That’s according to a new survey conducted by Kaseya which polled more than 400 global respondents.
The study identified that just under half (42%) of respondents automate or plan to automate patch management and, similarly, just 42% monitor third party software and apply critical patches within 30 days.
The survey also highlighted a strong correlation between outages and data breaches. Just under two thirds (61%) of respondents who had a security breach last year also had two to four outages, a 15% increase from 2018. Overall, improving security is the top IT priority for more than half (57%) of SMBs, up from 54% in 2018 and 40% in 2017.
“In a world where cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and high-profile breaches more prevalent, it is no surprise that SMBs and the mid-market have a strong focus on security issues,” said Mike Puglia, chief strategy officer, Kaseya. “However, our survey shows that there is still a lot for them to do. The lack of automated patching in place is a serious concern as is the prevalence of breaches and their correlation with the outages that organisations suffer.”
The survey did find, however, that nearly 90% of respondents backup their servers. Backup to the cloud in combination with the other media is among the top five business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies, adopted by 33% of the respondents. Concerningly, however, only 29% of respondents back up their SaaS application data, showing no improvement from 2018.
“The adoption of modern information technology solutions has the ability to transform the structure and daily operations of today’s IT teams, allowing companies to offer a greater variety of solutions and higher levels of service to their customers” added Puglia.
“As these technologies mature into the 2020s, the playing field will continue to level as midsize businesses and smaller IT organisations leverage more powerful tools to compete with their large enterprise counterparts.” Puglia concluded: “With these new tools, IT teams can meet the challenges of ever-increasing customer expectations and security threats that demand constant innovation and operational improvements from frequently overworked staff.”
About Kaseya’s 2019 State of IT Operations for Small and Midsize Businesses” survey
Kaseya has conducted the IT Operations survey since 2014 to gauge the trends and capabilities of SMB IT teams, to share this knowledge with the greater IT community, and to better understand customer needs.
To download the full “2019 State of IT Operations for SMBs” report go to: https://www.kaseya.com/resource/2019-it-operations-survey-report/
About Kaseya
Kaseya® is the leading provider of complete IT infrastructure management solutions for managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT organisations. Through its open platform and customer-centric approach, Kaseya delivers best in breed technologies that allow organisations to efficiently manage, secure, and backup IT. The Kaseya IT Complete platform is the industry’s most comprehensive, integrated solution suite purposely engineered to help IT both run and grow the business. It empowers businesses to command all of IT centrally, easily manage remote and distributed environments, simplify backup and disaster recovery, and automate across IT management functions. Kaseya solutions manage over 10 million endpoints worldwide. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and Miami, FL, Kaseya is privately held with a presence in over 20 countries. To learn more, visit www.kaseya.com.
