Netwrix, a cybersecurity vendor that makes data security easy, has announced the release of the 2020 Netwrix IT Trends report: Reshaped Reality, which reveals the change in IT priorities for organisations for the rest of the year due to the coronavirus outbreak based on the global survey of 937 IT pros. The top three IT priorities for the 120 IT respondents from the UK were network security (73%), data security (71%) and cybersecurity awareness among employees (69%).
The online survey, conducted in June 2020, asked respondents to name up to five IT projects for the rest of the year; they could pick from a predefined list or specify their own. The list offered similar options to the 2020 IT Trends Report that was released at the end of 2019 except for two options such as ‘network security’ and ‘supporting cloud infrastructure’, which were added to better reflect the current needs. While data security remained the top priority for the UK organisations, the importance of raising cybersecurity awareness among employees increased nearly twice from 39 per cent before the Coronavirus crisis to 69 per cent after it.
Other findings include:
- UK organisations are more focused on data privacy now than before the crisis as 60% prioritised this option compared to 30% pre-pandemic
- The number of UK organisations that consider digital transformation as their top priority has significantly decreased from 57% before the pandemic to 20% now
- The importance of cloud migration has decreased from 52% before the pandemic to 22% now
- Only 40% of the UK respondents plan to focus on automation of IT processes. This number is down from 70% pre-pandemic
- Compliance has moved from the middle of the list to the bottom of top-10 with 18%
Ilia Sotnikov, Vice President of Product Management at Netwrix said, “increasing cybersecurity awareness is a necessary measure for UK organisations since remote work has required them to address the human factor as one of the major cyber risks to sensitive data. Yet, simply educating users is not enough - it is important that organisations have in place tools providing them with visibility into where this data resides and who has access to it. Coupled with more educated users, such an approach is one of the best ways to protect what’s important to enterprises today.”
