71% of IT Leaders Expect Increased Cyber Breach and Expenditure Risks Due To Expanding Enterprise Technology Management Blind Spots

Oomnitza, the leading provider of Enterprise Technology Management (ETM) solutions, revealed a new snapshot survey, conducted by Gatepoint Research, which found that siloed technology management is increasing operational blind spots and cyber risk. While three fourths (76%) of enterprises employ multiple systems to oversee the underlying technology that supports their IT and business services, the majority (71%) of IT leaders anticipate increased security breaches and operational expenditures.

According to IDC¹, 60% of the total U.S. workforce will be mobile workers by 2024. While IDC expects cloud workload migration to grow in the double digits², shadow IT growth, demonstrated by the use of unauthorized cloud services, has become a commonplace occurrence within as much as half of all industries³. In addition, a recent PWC survey⁴ showed that a third of executives support a mixed in-person, hybrid, and remote workplace model. The influx of technology, combined with mobile, cloud, and hybrid workplace dynamics, are challenging conventional enterprise IT asset discovery, lifecycle management, and security controls.

“The siloed and costly ways enterprise organizations manage their IT estate today are affecting IT service delivery and satisfaction, budgeting and audit efficacy, and attack surface management integrity,” said Arthur Lozinski, CEO and co-founder of Oomnitza. “The survey findings serve to raise awareness of increasing enterprise technology management challenges and how IT leaders are responding.”

The Managing Enterprise Technology Blind Spots survey examines how enterprises are governing technology, the operations issues and business impact they are experiencing, and where they intend to make investments. The research found that solely relying on disparate systems to manage classes of technology, from endpoints and applications, to network and cloud infrastructure, does not provide the integrated visibility, lifecycle control, or automation necessary to optimize resources and manage risk. The survey infographic highlights key findings including:

• Technology management:  76% of enterprises are using multiple systems to find inventory data about different technologies
• Security impact:  71% expressed increased risk of security breach and associated costs.
• Top operational issues:  insecure and lost endpoints, unaccounted for or incorrect data on assets, poor visibility into asset status, lack of compliance adherence, and overspending on software and cloud resources
• SaaS oversight:  a quarter of enterprises use more than 100 SaaS applications and 15% use more than 200 SaaS applications
• Top 5 business impacts:  include wasted spend in software licenses or cloud services, lost time tracking down asset status/details, wasted spend due to unaccounted assets, delays onboarding/offboarding employees, and compliance audit fines and exposure
• Corrective action timeframe: 52% intend to take corrective action for technology management this year with 11% having projects already underway
• Desired management capabilities:  key focus areas were unified technology view and data, comprehensive asset discovery and tracking, security policy enforcement and lifecycle process automation, and mechanisms to improve employee experience

To download the survey infographic, please visit:  Tech Blind Spots Survey. The full report is available here.

Survey Details
The research, conducted by Gatepoint Research and compiled in January 2022, surveyed IT leaders from 100 enterprises of more than 5,000 employees across industries in the U.S. The respondents comprised executive (40%) and management (60%) levels. Over half the survey respondents are responsible for managing more than 5,000 endpoints in the company.

^{1 IDC Press Release, U.S. Mobile Worker Population Forecast, 2020-2024, January 2022}

^{2 IDC Press Release, Worldwide Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS Workloads Forecast, 2021-2025, August 2021}

^{3 Knowbe4 - ShadowIT research, Q1-2022}

^{4 PWC Pulse-Survey – Future of Work, August 2021}