To safeguard a firm, how many IT security solutions are required? According to some IT decision-makers, there are too many
According to a Flexera survey of 800 IT leaders, they are overpaying on cyber security products.
According to the research, 31% of the IT decision-makers who participated said that the biggest area where they overpaid was on IT security products. This is an increase of six points over the study conducted last year (25%).
The results indicate that discussions about the proliferation of security solutions and the challenges of combining disparate technology are still continuing strong, despite the fact that lowering IT security risks came in second (28%) behind artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of goals for the upcoming year.
In its survey of 503 IT decision-makers in North America last year, analyst IDC examined the following topics: data security, vulnerability and exposure management, endpoint detection and response, extended detection and response, network security, next-generation firewall, security information and event management, security service edge, and cloud-native application protection platforms. A quarter of the respondents reported having between 21 and 40 security tools in their environment, while the remaining respondents had between 41 and 60 tools.
According to 68% of IT leaders surveyed by Flexera, business units are spending far more on cloud and software as a service (SaaS) than they realize, even when it comes to IT security technologies.
Overspending on cloud, software, SaaS, and hardware is expected to be between 20 and 25 percent on average, according to those questioned. Controlling the rise of IT spending was cited by 45% of respondents as their top problem, followed by addressing IT spending efficiency and preventing waste by 40% and handling software provider pricing increases by 39%.
According to Flexera, the replies indicate that IT directors want more comprehensive insight into their total technology investment, but they are always balancing unknowns as they try to figure out how to effectively address overspending and better balance their portion of the budget.
Additionally, according to the poll results, AI is changing the priorities of IT leaders. AI integration was ranked as the top priority for the upcoming year by nearly half (48%) of the IT leaders surveyed.
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Conal Gallagher, chief information officer of Flexera, stated that although IT executives are confronted with several possibilities and difficulties, artificial intelligence appears to provide the greatest potential benefits both in the short and long term.
“AI projects come at an extraordinary cost, which makes it even more urgent to not only comprehend the impact of the investment but also to show returns that quickly advance core business objectives,” he continued.
AI is not just upending and changing IT—for instance, by putting greater emphasis on computational power and data quality—but it is also sowing the seeds for a shift in how we all operate. It should come as no surprise that IT is leading the charge to identify and bring about this disruption, serving as a compass for their companies.