Businesses are looking for a balanced mix of expertise, financial stability and price when they are choosing an IT provider.
A report from analyst firm Kable shows an even split between these criteria and areas such as specific functionality expertise and depth and whether it’s a leading-edge technology, while financing options and geographical reach rank as the least important.
When it comes to security, the key focus is on identity and access management with 79.7% already investing, with a further 65.4% prioritising investment in this area of the next two years.
Surprisingly, data loss prevention for mobile security is the least in use product area at 66%, with 61.4% prioritising spending in the next two years. Given the growing use of mobiles as the main tool for business users, the lack of products and planned spending in this area suggests little concerns in this area.
Application security products are only in use by 70.5% and only 60.9% plan to invest in the area in the next two years. Again, given the importance of business applications, it is surprising that more focus is not being placed on their security.
Network security is tied with backup and archive for the second most in use security products and the planned investment is also the same.
Given the areas that businesses are focusing their investment on and security threats ever present, it is an important gauge to see whether they are satisfied with the service being received from providers.
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Cisco proved to be leading in the satisfaction stakes, ranking 3.3 out of a possible 4. However it is only deployed by 5.8% of respondents, with only HP deployed by less with 5.1%.
The Ratings for IBM (3.2), Microsoft (3.3), Symantec (3.2) and McAfee (3.2) all reveal high levels of satisfaction, but even when combined the companies are deployed less than other companies. Despite the lower levels of deployment, they all rated higher on satisfaction than other companies.
All figures come from Kable’s ICT Customer Insight survey, which polled 2685 respondents for security products currently in use and those that are prioritised for investment in the next two years.
The survey had 2685 respondents for the importance of various criteria in choosing an IT provider and 1533 for the average ratings for primary providers in security products.
The research firm can be subscribed to at its website.
