Smaller business' IT budgets prioritize remote work, security and cloud

The IT budgets of small and medium businesses will prioritize three things in the coming year: remote management (58.4 percent), security (55.9 percent), and cloud services (50.1 percent), according to a new report.

The latest State of the SME IT Admin Report from JumpCloud also reveals that 74 percent of the 400+ IT decision makers surveyed say remote work makes it harder for employees to follow good security practices.

"COVID-19 has highlighted that while IT admins are often behind the scenes, they are the team that ensures secure and simple workflows for every employee in SMEs," says Rajat Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud. "Remote work put enormous pressure on admins and organizations, and now that the work landscape has changed permanently, the top priority for SMEs is to address those challenges. IT professionals' 2021 priorities of layered security for more secure work-from-anywhere, making remote work easier, and more efficient device management underscore the need for a more consolidated, platform approach to IT that reduces complexities and cost."

Particular concerns are managing identities, with 62 percent saying they pay for more tooling than they need to manage user identities, and more than half (56 percent) saying they are spending too much to enable remote work.

The top three security concerns are software vulnerability (39 percent), employees using the same username and password across apps (37 percent), using an unsecured network (36 percent) and device theft (29 percent).

Encouragingly a zero trust security approach has already been adopted by 24 percent, with another 33 percent planning to adopt one. 33 percent of respondents are zero trust champions within their organization, along with other champions in IT (30 percent), security roles (18 percent), and executives (18 percent).

You can find out more in the full report on the JumpCloud site.

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