The latest Kaseya benchmark survey shows IT security remains a top priority and organizations are investing more in cybersecurity this year.

Kaseya surveyed close to 2,000 IT professionals globally for its benchmark survey.

This year’s Kaseya survey shows the top three priorities are improving IT security overall (52%), increasing IT productivity through automation (33%), and migrating to the cloud (32%). The main three challenges are cybersecurity and data protection (49%), insufficient IT budgets and resources to meet demands (29%), and legacy systems that hamper growth and innovation (21%).

IT Budgets ‘Huge Concern’ for Businesses

Mike Puglia is Kaseya‘s chief strategy officer.

Kaseya’s Mike Puglia

“Every year, there’s a challenge that needs to be addressed more than others,” he said. “This year, people were investing more in cybersecurity. To stay on budget, that means something else needs to be put to the side. IT has always been expected to do more with less, and that is still the case for many. But we saw more companies indicating an increase in their IT budgets for the first time in awhile. Businesses are seeing their IT environment as an investment rather than an expense. But even with budgets increasing for so many, there are still worries about it. Whether they think it’s not going to be enough, or they’re concerned about it decreasing, budgets are still a huge concern.”

In addition, there’s more people involved in the decision-making process for major IT purchases, Puglia said. That can cause significant delays in onboarding new software.

“A majority of respondents indicated two-to-five decision makers with 6% seeing over 10,” he said. “These situations where there’s ‘too many cooks’ can make it harder for IT teams to advance their software. This can, at best, result in continued efficiency issues and, at worst, leave them vulnerable to cyberattacks.”

Solution Integration Strongly Supported

Another key Kaseya survey finding this year is that 54% of respondents support integration strongly. That’s up from 48% last year. Most said integration between all their solutions is the best approach. When asked which solutions specifically would benefit the most from integrations, they said the top three were access to IT documentation, the ability to run automation scripts, and ticket management.

Some 53% of IT professionals surveyed expect security staffing to increase this year. That represents a 7% increase over last year. Another notable takeaway is that remote workforce management, which was the third-biggest budget driver last year, slipped three spots with 22% of respondents considering it an important driver.

According to the Kaseya survey, the top IT functions businesses are outsourcing to MSPs are IT security, cloud infrastructure management, backup management, network monitoring, help desk and endpoint management (desktops, laptops and servers)

Relying on MSPs

“Every cyberattack you hear about makes a huge number of businesses re-evaluate their security stack, their backup and disaster recovery tools, and their endpoint detection system,” Puglia said. “A lot of these businesses are going to their MSP for help with cybersecurity because so many of them feel lost when it comes to securing their business and they trust their MSP to be an adviser. Not to mention, governments around the world are realizing that they need to protect their citizens from these attacks so they’re increasing regulations that make organizations take a proactive stance to cybersecurity. Complying with these requirements is going to be super important for MSPs because it will not only protect their customers from receiving hefty fines pertaining to compliance, but it will also ensure their business – their livelihood – is safe from attacks, which is really what they want at the end of the day.”

For MSPs, it’s all about having the most efficient and cost-effective stack on the market, he said.

“The more integrations between the tools you’re offering clients and the more automation that they have, the better,” Puglia said. “A huge percentage of lost productivity goes to switching back and forth between applications and doing the same, repetitive tasks every day. Businesses are calling for integration and automation. They want their jobs to be as easy as possible so they can do more in less time. If you can help your clients do this, you can maintain a competitive advantage over the MSPs that aren’t doing this yet.”