87% of CIOs Have Trouble Managing Cyber-Security Threats

The rapid pace of IT changes gives CIOs headaches when it comes to cybersecurity, according to new research.

Nine out of ten UK CIOs (93 per cent) also believe that IT complexity has increased. A new study shows that cloud computing (66 per cent), legacy technology (51 per cent) and software licensing (51 per cent) are the biggest contributors to IT complexity across organizations.

71 per cent of the surveyed agree that it’s difficult to choose the right technology, while 61 per cent said choosing the right solution to their business problem is very complicated.

This transition from the internet-enabled business to the digital one is a huge increase in complexity for IT departments designed for business as usual technical operations, while traditional models of integration, licensing and management that were not designed for cloud are exacerbating the problem,” says James Butler, CTO at Trustmarque.

The research also found that the complexity of managing and transforming legacy IT is difficult to reconcile with pressures from the business to assist with innovation. Traditional models of IT are often unable to support these new requirements and increased pace of change. As a result, 89 per cent of CIOs find challenging the task of simplifying legacy IT whilst driving innovation.

Businesses are primarily interested in simplifying IT, especially when it comes to management of shadow IT and IT spend.

In terms of IT skills, 80 per cent of CIOs stated that they lacked the necessary skills and resources in-house, especially since the set of skills required has changed a lot in the past five years.

The study was conducted on 200 UK CIOs and senior IT decision makers from large enterprises with over 1,000 employees.