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SMBs cite security, backup & recovery as top business concerns
Mon, 9th Sep 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Small businesses around the world acknowledge that cybersecurity, backup and data recovery are important aspects of their business, but most of those businesses sit between the two lowest levels of IT maturity.

The lack of maturity reflects an ongoing problem that small businesses face – the need to protect their operations, often without the required IT skills and solutions to match.

According to Kaseya's 2019 State of IT Operations for Small and Midsize Businesses survey, more than half of survey respondents sit at the lowest levels of IT maturity.

 Thirty-five percent of respondents are at the lowest level of IT operational maturity (reactive); another 21% are at the second level of maturity (efficient), while only 11% of respondents said they have a strategic role in driving business innovation (strategic level of maturity).

The report notes that many of these businesses are in ‘constant firefighting mode' as they try to deal with IT issues.

Respondents ranked security as the top priority for the third year in a row. According to the survey, 32% of respondents experienced a security breach in the last five years, with 10% affected by a breach in the last year.

As a result, SMBs are looking towards automated patch management software as an answer, and as an area for improvement.

The survey found that 42% of respondents monitor third party software and apply critical patches within 30 days.

Furthermore, outages as a result of breaches are a key concern. Almost 61% of respondents that had experienced a security breach in the last year had also suffered from outages.

Backup and disaster recovery are important to protect data in outages and other situations. Almost 90% of respondents back up their servers, with the most popular backup methods being cloud.

However, 29% of businesses back up SaaS application data like Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite data, indicating that they are not getting better at taking responsibility for these types of backup.

“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,” comments Kaseya's chief strategy officer, Mike 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.

“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.

The 2019 State of IT Operations for Small and Midsize Businesses survey polled 400 respondents worldwide.