7 Tech Nightmares Haunting IT Pros This Halloween
Sinister service outages, blood-curdling budget constraints, and chilling cyberthreats have long been the stuff of IT nightmares. Now a new survey looks at what's really terrifying IT pros this Halloween and beyond.
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If you think zombies, ghosts, and vampires are scary, consider the plight of the typical IT professional.
The uncertainty of the cloud is on one side, line-of-business leaders buying their own technology are on the other. All the while, a fleet of employees bringing their own devices is coming right down the middle. It's enough to make IT pros want to run into a darkened server closet. (Wait! No! Don't go in there! All your servers have been outsourced!)
There are so many scary things facing IT pros all year long, not only around Halloween. Cyberattacks, shrinking budgets, outsourcing, and more.
To get a reality check on the scariest things that are keeping IT pros awake at night, PR firm Finn Partners conducted a survey of these professionals.
[See 14 Creepy Ways to Use Big Data.]
"The challenges these IT decision makers face each day are truly daunting," said Sabrina Horn, managing partner and technology practice lead at Finn Partners, in a prepared statement.
"From aging technology infrastructures, to cybersecurity threats, to the need to keep up with the latest innovations, it's no wonder we received a lot of scary, uncertain opinions about what lies ahead. But these findings also highlight the need for technology providers to better communicate the business outcomes they deliver, making it a little less uncertain for everyone."
Finn Partners surveyed 511 US-based IT decision-makers between Sept. 6 and Sept. 13, 2016. Respondents to the survey identified themselves as senior employees with decision-making influence in one or more of the following areas:
PCs, laptops, or tablets
peripherals (such as printers, projectors, or consumables)
software solutions
servers, storage or virtualization solutions
IT services, such as technical support, maintenance, repair, consulting, training, and outsourced services
Here are scary scenarios haunting IT decision-makers' nightmares this Halloween, plus a look at some technologies that are poised to vanquish the monsters and provide value to IT organizations in the years ahead.
Among the findings of the survey was that the Grim Reaper is coming for some technologies that have been regular fixtures in IT shops. Which technologies will be picked off one by one, according to these IT pros? A full 30% said desktop computers will die, 28% said hard disk drives are headed for the grave, 19% said USB flash drives are not long for this world, and 10% said desktop virtualization will perish.
Findings also point to some differences by age and gender to acceptance of technology changes -- and deaths -- that are coming. Finn Partners said that women appear to be more open to the pending changes, with 63% saying that at least one of these technologies will be gone in two years. Some 55% of their male counterparts say so. Younger IT workers appear to be more interested in progress, too, with 36% of those under the age of 35 saying desktops will soon be dead. Only 26% of respondents over 55 agree.
Finn Partners also asked IT decision-makers about the scariest challenges they face during the day, and about those that keep them awake at night. Two of these tied at the bottom of the list, since 18% of respondents said that both zero-day viruses and DoS attack/hacks kept them up at night.
The call is coming from inside the house! Run! Actually, it's best not to run. A full 19% of IT professionals said insider threats and rogue employees created a top concern and challenge every day.
It's pretty terrifying when your hardware, your software, your systems, and your data are taken hostage. That's probably why users are willing to pay out money to criminals to return their systems and information to normal. That's probably why 22% of IT decision-makers cited a ransomware threat as a top fear.
Email is down! Office 365 is down! You can't access your work! Did it even save?
Is there really anything more terrifying than an outage? Are those pinpricks of anxiety running down your spine and that cold sweat suddenly seeping from your pores caused by the outage itself or the thought of your users coming at you with torches, yelling "Monster! Monster!"? Maybe it's both, which is probably why 26% of IT decision-makers said that a major service outage is a top concern.
While the scenarios on the previous pages are truly terrifying, the highest percentage of IT decision-makers responding to the survey -- 31% -- said that information or data breaches were the top concern. That's the scenario that populated their personal nightmares, and it's no wonder. High-profile information breaches grab headlines and embarrass top executives at big companies.
IT decision-makers said that a number of challenges related to loss of control shackled their efforts to meet the needs of their enterprises. These challenges include budget constraints (cited by 21%), disaster recovery/high availability (16%), IT skills development and training (14%), and end-user training (cited by 11%). To help IT pros conquer these challenges, Finn Partners recommended that IT vendors help their customers by providing price and performance options for solutions they offer. They should also build in more training to ensure that solutions are leveraged to the greatest advantage.
What technologies are set vanquish the monsters -- to help organizations advance and provide the most value? IT decision-makers identified a handful of technologies that would fit that description over the next two years. These technologies are: cloud services (cited by 52% of respondents), big data (23%), virtual desktop infrastructure (23%), 3D printing (23%), virtual reality (20%), advanced machine learning (13%), and mobile backend-as-a-service (10%).
Finn Partners noted that among companies with 500 or more employees, 32% of respondents said that big data would become extremely valuable to their organizations. That figure compares to 17% of those respondents from smaller companies.
What technologies are set vanquish the monsters -- to help organizations advance and provide the most value? IT decision-makers identified a handful of technologies that would fit that description over the next two years. These technologies are: cloud services (cited by 52% of respondents), big data (23%), virtual desktop infrastructure (23%), 3D printing (23%), virtual reality (20%), advanced machine learning (13%), and mobile backend-as-a-service (10%).
Finn Partners noted that among companies with 500 or more employees, 32% of respondents said that big data would become extremely valuable to their organizations. That figure compares to 17% of those respondents from smaller companies.
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