Tanium’s IT Leads the Way: How the Pandemic Empowered IT study evaluates the primary IT operations and security challenges organisations have faced amid the large-scale shift to remote work in the COVID-19 pandemic, and how businesses plan to adapt moving forward. The report was conducted by PSB Insights and surveyed 500 senior-level IT decision-makers (ITDMs) in the US and UK across a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail.

The Tanium IT Leads the Way: How the Pandemic Empowered IT study’s headline findings include:

1. Enterprises were overly confident in their security posture pre-COVID-19. Eighty-eight percent of companies reported that before the pandemic they felt some level of confidence in their ability to fully and securely support remote work. Yet, when forced to go remote, only 39% of organisations found it easy to actually shift employees. Despite this, only 33% considered ‘improving cybersecurity’ as one of their top three IT initiatives for 2021

2. Since the pandemic, ITDMs have observed risky behaviour from employees ranging from storing sensitive data (41%) to clicking on phishing emails (38%) to inappropriate admin access (37%)

3. Risky behaviours have been seen around the use of Shadow IT/unsanctioned apps (35%), chat or conference apps (31%) and third-party file shares (31%) as employees try to be productive while working remotely

4. Since the pandemic began, 30% of respondents have observed their end users ‘not updating software’. It’s imperative that organisations prioritise asset inventory and software updates to protect themselves from critical vulnerabilities and potential attacks

5. Underlining the criticality of cloud in maintaining business continuity after remote work was introduced, 66% of respondent companies accelerated their planned investments in cloud infrastructure. However, the cloud is not being adopted at the same rate in different regions. Forty percent of US IT decision-makers believe their company is well ahead of other companies in adopting new technologies such as cloud services, compared to only 24% of UK IT decision-makers who feel the same

6. After cloud infrastructure, organisations also prioritised investments in data and information security (63%), threat detection (60%), security/compliance software and services (59%), and device management (50%). The vast majority of ITDMs cite the pandemic as a key reason for the changes in budgeting priorities

7. 73% of respondents say they face new IT security challenges, and 52% noted these challenges have become more complex since the pandemic started. Operations teams are also under pressure with 69 percent of respondents saying they face new IT operations challenges and 56% noting these challenges have become more complex

8. Compared to their plans before the pandemic, 38% of businesses accelerated investments in technology that supports a Zero Trust architecture. Additionally, 55% accelerated identity and access management investments, and 51% accelerated investment in secure adaptive access. This comes at a time when visibility and management across newly distributed workforces is crucial

9. Accelerated investments in device management (50%), software management (49%) and compliance management software/services (48%) also reveal a need for a unifying platform to identify, inventory and manage endpoints