At the beginning of the year, the majority of businesses decide upon their budgets and spending options based on factors such as the previous year’s profits and trends, future expansion and scalability plans, expert forecasts, and many more. However, these budgets and business forecasts did not anticipate a pandemic this year, which brought things to a grinding halt. A lot has changed over the past six months, thus, Hitachi ID in collaboration with Pulse conducted a survey to find the shift in priorities of CIOs and IT heads from 131 companies worldwide. Out of these, 70% believed that long-term IT priorities have changed since the start of the year and that cybersecurity is now a top priority of their company for the remainder of 2020.
Key Highlights
- Hitachi ID and Pulse together conducted a survey called “Top IT Budget Priorities Through 2020.”
- 89% and 82% of the respondents believe that cybersecurity remote support are the top two priorities of their companies for the rest of 2020.
- 86% of CIOs are looking forward to improving security standards across their business environment.
- 43% of CIOs are investing in identity and access management tools.
- 67% of the surveyed individuals are now willing to invest in emerging technologies due to the pandemic’s impact.
Why Cybersecurity is Emerging as a Top Priority
With the majority of the workforce still working in a distributed home environment and no signs of an immediate return to the office spaces post-COVID, coupled with the vulnerability that the fragmented workforce poses to business and network security, global CIOs are rooting to beef up their cybersecurity measures at the earliest. This is not just a temporary shift, in fact, 87% of IT leaders are wanting to increase their security by investing in emerging technologies for the long haul.
In another interesting revelation, the CIOs prioritized identity and access management over endpoint security and security awareness training to its employees stating that it is a must for a long-term security posture.
The survey also highlighted that security technologies based on AI and ML are hot favorites among CIOs with nearly 71% wanting to implement them. Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight, said, “The trend toward AI/ML in security has been accelerated by the current situation. In addition, some “old school” technologies like VDI and VPN are getting a lot more attention as circumstances have made office network security less relevant. However, the key to effective AI is structured learning. Just turning an algorithm loose against a dataset may not yield much, but with the combination of AI, human intelligence, and understanding, it’s amazing what we can achieve.”
