A new index shows IT decision makers (ITDMs) are concerned about the resources available and allotted to them for addressing cybersecurity threats, and meeting current and future business demands.

Intermedia’s inaugural IT Confidence Index pinpointed the biggest challenges across IT functions. The index surveyed 350 ITDMs, measuring IT confidence levels on a 10-point scale, where zero represents “not confident at all” and 10 represents “extremely confident.”

The index revealed a modest overall confidence score of 7.2 out of 10. Questions spanned across four topic categories — security, general IT services, infrastructure and skilled IT workforce.

Jonathan Levine, Intermedia’s chief technology officer, tells Channel Partners the channel should see ITDMs’ low levels of IT confidence as a “cry for more help.”

“By offering a managed services practice, IT consultants can create more value for ITDMs building on the strategic guidance they already provide,” he said. “With only a modest overall confidence score of 7.2, organizations need to think more broadly about increasing value-add and ensure their IT team has all the tools they need to be successful. Whether strengthening security, moving on-premises applications into the cloud or furthering education within the IT workforce, the channel can be that voice of reason to help organizations quickly address IT worries.”{ad}

The index finds that small companies are struggling the most across all four categories. Companies with fewer than 50 employees scored 5.9 versus medium to large companies, which scored 8.7 and 8.9, respectively. As company size and cloud adoption increased, so did confidence levels.

“Smaller companies need to seek their channel partners for help in taking a more cloud-based approach, which will aim to boost their confidence in IT,” Levine said. “As the report findings also show, ITDMs are looking for cloud experts, specifically in the areas of ransomware and compliance regulations.”

Relative to security, ITDMs were the least confident in their organization’s ability to prevent, withstand or stop ransomware, botnets and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

“This also demonstrates that we are nowhere near ready to deal with this evolving security threat,” Levine said. “This comes to us as a surprise because even with technological innovations and continued efforts around educating people about ransomware, the number of attacks are still on the rise and it will only get worse in 2017. What’s more is that these breaches can also impact both partners and consumers, illustrating how channel partners aren’t fully prepared to deal with ransomware and are at a greater risk than they might think.”

On average, 56 percent of internal IT applications currently run in the cloud. Thirty-seven percent of ITDMs expected to increase this number over the next six months.

Relative to infrastructure spending, ITDMs gave a score of 6.5 – the lowest of all categories tracked – indicating that companies may not be investing enough.

MSPs and VARs need to adapt, according to the index. Thirty-three percent of ITDMs felt that IT consultants were too hardware focused, and 24 percent felt that IT consultants weren’t putting enough emphasis on cloud offerings, demonstrating that “MSPs and VARs have a long way to go in their cloud transitions to catch up to the market,” it said.