Survey: IT professionals report an increase in security issues

Ivanti, a Salt Lake City-based IT security company, has released new findings from a survey studying the impact of the move to working from home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show IT workloads, security issues and communication challenges have all seen significant increases in a new remote working era.

For 63 percent of IT professionals, IT workloads have increased since going remote. Top incidents and requests impacting their amount of work include 74 percent with VPN issues, 56 percent with demands for video conferencing, 48 percent dealing with bandwidth constraints, and nearly half (47 percent) dealing with password resets and messaging problems.

Compounding the challenge is the sheer volume of employees now working remotely, the study showed. Forty-three percent of IT professionals report at least 75 percent of their employees now work remotely and more than a third said 100 percent of their employees are working remotely. According to survey respondents, this is an increase of 93 percent in the past few months, showing a dramatic and rapid shift following the coronavirus outbreak.

This remote shift is critically impacting IT security posture. Two-thirds (66 percent) of IT professionals reported a rise in security issues in the expanded remote environment, including top issues of malicious emails, risky employee behavior and software vulnerabilities.

“Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed placed an unprecedented demand on IT teams as they work to balance security and user productivity for the new remote workforce,” said Phil Richards, chief security officer at Ivanti. “It’s a shift we see firsthand at Ivanti. To ease the new IT workload, we found that by employing more IT service automation and asset management optimization, our IT staff is better equipped to support users’ needs, while also taking necessary actions to mitigate security risk. As a result, we are able to ensure employees can remain both productive and safe.”