The “2019 State of IT Operations for Small and Midsize Businesses” report by solutions provider Kaseya reveals security remains top priority for SMBs, together with the growing role of the cloud in backup and disaster recovery.
The survey involves the input of over 400 global respondents. It shows 32% of respondents experienced a security breach over the past 5 years, a slight decrease from the 35% of 2018, with at least 10% saying they were hit by a breach in the last year. As such, it should come to no surprise many SMBs point out automated software patch management as a key area for improvement, with 42% of respondents either automating or planning to automate patch management. Similarly just 42% monitor 3rd party software and apply critical patches within 30 days.
The 2019 also shows a strong correlation between outages and data breaches-- nearly 61% of respondents who had a security breach in 2018 also had 2-4 outages, a 15% increase over 2018, an indication of the faltering progress in improving IT maturity. As such, it should come to no surprise improving security is the top priority for 57% of SMBs, up from 54% in 2018 and 40% in 2017.
Nearly 90% of respondents back up servers, with backup to the cloud in combination with other media among the top 5 business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies, being adopted by 33% of respondents. Just 29% of respondents back up SaaS application data (Microsoft Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, etc), with no improvement from 2018. This shows a lack of ownership and understanding that SaaS data backup for anything over 30 days old is the responsibility of the customer.
Overall cloud adoption is high and reservations to adoption are gone. However as companies entrust critical apps to run on the cloud, they leave themselves open to major risk by not backing up SaaS application data.
The survey shows IT maturity has not improved over the past 3 years. Over 50% of respondents have been at the two lowest levels of operational maturity, with many in constant firefighting mode. 35% are at the lowest level of maturity (reactive) and another 21% are at the second level (efficient). Only 11% are at the strategic level of maturity.
Delivering higher service levels is another top priority in 2019, but is at odds with a decline in the percentage of respondents with formal service level agreements (SLAs). The percentage of respondents without formal SLAs in place is up from 35% in 2017 to 39% in 2018 and 43% in 2019. The IT department has an increasing influence in the C-suite, while GDPR is in 3rd place in the list of top Compliance Regulations in 2019, following HIPAA and PCI.
“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," Kaseya says. "As these technologies mature into the 2020s, the playing field will continue to level as midsize businesses and smaller IT organizations leverage more powerful tools to compete with their large enterprise counterparts 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.”
