Fears around shadow IT and demand for simplification
The newest edition of JumpCloud‘s SME IT Trends Report, “Detours Ahead: How IT Navigates an Evolving World is out today. This biannual survey of IT teams at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) reveals how IT pros are responding to the growing threat of shadow IT and AI, how teams manage complicated device and IT environments, the relationship between IT and managed service providers (MSPs) and IT’s biggest challenges and preferences.
“IT teams are dealing with many obstacles. They face uncertainty about economic conditions and elections. There are growing security threats, complex tech stacks, and device varieties. Despite this and more, IT admins are resilient and resourceful,” said Greg Keller, co-founder and chief technology officer. “What’s keeping them up at night is what they can’t see — 84% of IT admins worry about shadow IT. To help combat the security holes shadow IT creates, IT needs to deploy tools to help spot rogue apps. This will give IT teams the control and visibility they need to keep organisations safe.”
Control and visibility are high on the wish list, as 49% of IT teams say that despite their best efforts, their organisation lacks the resources and staffing to secure it against cybersecurity threats.
The report reveals a number of key findings about how IT teams are navigating the ongoing complexities of cloud computing and AI, as 84% of IT teams say they’re concerned about applications managed outside of IT. While the concerns around shadow IT are widespread, there are several factors that seem to be preventing IT teams from addressing it.
When asked about the biggest blockers, 36% say they have more important priorities, 31% say business users move too fast to keep up with their needs, 32% say they don’t have the ability to discover all the applications used by employees, 29% say they lack partnership and communication with business partners, and 24% say they don’t have a SaaS management or asset management solution to manage shadow IT.
This comes as nearly half (45%) of SMEs have been the victim of a cybersecurity attack in the first half of 2024. The most common source for cyberattacks was phishing (43%), followed by shadow IT (37%), stolen or lost credentials (33%), and a breach in a partner’s organisation (30%).
Other key findings include:
- SMEs continue to support a diverse device environment. The average SME allows their employees to use a variety of devices. The average device landscape is made up of 24% macOS devices (up from 22% in Q1 2024), 18% Linux devices (down from 22%), and 63% Windows devices (up from 60%).
- Such variety of devices and a growing number of digital identities has admins continuing their plea for a centralised IT. Eighty-four percent of IT teams prefer a single platform to manage user identity, access, and security over many best-in-class point solutions.
- Too many credentials are causing chaos. Nearly half of IT admins (45%) require five to 10 tools to manage the worker lifecycle, and over a quarter (28%) need 11 applications or more.
- Security fears dominate. Sixty percent of SMEs consider security the biggest IT challenge, followed distantly by new service and application rollouts (42%), the cost of solutions necessary to enable remote work (40.8%), and device management (39%). The four biggest security concerns are network attacks (40%), followed by software vulnerability exploits (31%), ransomware (31%), and shadow IT (29%).
- The threat is rising, as are worries about security budget cuts. Over half (50%) of IT teams report being more concerned about their organisation’s security posture than they were six months ago, down slightly from the 56% who said the same in Q1 2024. Seventy-one percent say any cuts to their security budget would increase organisational risk.
- SMEs still need to securely manage passwords. While the industry pushes for passwordless authentication, 95% of respondents use passwords to secure at least some IT resources.
- MSPs are a critical tool for SMEs and investment is expected to increase. Seventy-six percent of SMEs rely on an MSP for at least some functions, the same as the 76% who reported so in Q1 2024. Over the next 12 months, 67% of SMEs say they’ll increase their MSP investment.
- While MSPs drive cost savings, SMEs report improvements in security and efficiency as the biggest return. When asked about the results of working with an MSP, 56% said MSPs led to better security. Fifty-seven percent said MSPs increased their effectiveness at managing IT, and 37% said they saved money for their organisation.
- Not all IT teams are eager to work with MSPs. For the 24% who don’t use an MSP, nearly half say it’s because they prefer to handle IT themselves (47%), and 39% say it’s because MSPs are too expensive.
- IT teams have a varied response to AI. When asked how their opinion changed in the last six months about how AI will impact their job, 22% say the impact of AI is much lower than they thought. Thirty-four percent say the potential impact of AI is the same but it’s moving slower than they thought it would. Twenty-one percent say their opinion hasn’t changed, and 23% say they feel the impact of AI is even greater than they thought it would be.
- AI fears remain while IT teams work to adopt it responsibly. Sixty-one percent agree that AI is outpacing their organisation’s ability to protect against threats. Over one-third of IT admins (35%) say they’re worried about AI’s impact on their job. This is down from the 45% who said the same in Q1 2024.
The full report, “Detours Ahead: How IT Navigates an Evolving World” can be downloaded at https://jumpcloud.com/resources/detours-ahead-how-it-navigates-an-evolving-world.