Syntax Releases First IT Trends Report

Multi-cloud and multi-ERP managed cloud services provider Syntax released its first ever “IT Trends Report” today.

The report is based on an October 2020 survey of 500 IT leaders and decision makers in the US who were asked to describe how the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted their businesses and to share the strategic decisions they plan to make in 2021.

The majority of those with in-house security teams (83%) said that they are considering outsourcing security efforts to a managed service provider (MSP) in 2021. However, 91% of respondents said that they employ either their own security operations center (SOC) or in-house security talent. 

Shrinking budgets had an impact on team size, with 79% of IT leaders reporting that they had to reduce team headcounts due to budget cuts in 2020. 

Over three-quarters of companies (77%) reported experiencing increasingly frequent cyber-attacks when the pandemic started.

“The pandemic has presented unparalleled challenges for businesses of all industries and sizes,” said Marc Caruso, chief architect of Syntax. 

“Despite the challenges of accelerated digital transformation timelines, this year has provided many lessons for IT and business leaders. One of the most important being the optimization of the best management and security practices for our cloud-native future of working-from-anywhere.”

More than half (56%) of the IT leaders said that they will allocate more than 40% of their IT budget to cybersecurity in 2021. Additionally, 37% listed “improving cybersecurity protections” as a top IT investment this year.

The report found that data analytics had been pushed onto the back burner in 2020, with 42% of IT leaders reporting the deprioritization of this and other business intelligence initiatives. In what could be show of optimism over what 2021 may hold, more than half (55%) said they are planning to increase investments in this space in 2021 as they leverage growing repositories of data to drive business decisions. 

Christian Primeau, global CEO of Syntax, doesn’t expect the monumental shift to remote working practices wrought by the pandemic to be permanent. 

He said: “When we return to our pre-pandemic environments, IT teams will increasingly rely on MSPs and third-party partners to support more aspects of IT governance, including cybersecurity, application management, disaster recovery, cloud migration, and more.”