Dive Brief:
- Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are split on whether their organizations will increase investments in cybersecurity next year, according to a JumpCloud report published Thursday. While 44% of respondents expect security spending cuts, 41% expect their budgets to remain unaffected.
- Despite the mixed outlook for cybersecurity budgets, IT spending is strong and 4 in 5 expect IT budgets to increase in 2023.
- Three-quarters of the respondents said organizational risk will increase as a result of cybersecurity budget cuts. The majority of IT administrators are already more concerned about their organization’s security posture than they were six months ago.
Dive Insight:
SMBs are struggling to confront more sophisticated and prolific threats as most see the negative impacts of a poor economic outlook hitting their bottom line.
IT administrators are bracing, and in some cases already absorbing, cybersecurity spending cuts during a particularly challenging period marked by high inflation and market volatility.
Almost 4 in 5 respondents said they see evidence of a recession in their business, and one-third of those IT administrators said their organization has been severely impacted by economic factors, according to JumpCloud’s IT trends report.
“[SMB] admins have skillfully managed IT through a period of sustained and unprecedented uncertainty in business and the world,” Rajat Bhargava, co-founder and CEO at JumpCloud, said in a statement.
More than half of the IT administrators surveyed said security is the biggest IT challenge confronting their organization. Network attacks, software vulnerability exploits and ransomware attacks ranked as the three biggest security concerns.
Meanwhile, two-thirds are concerned about multifactor authentication fatigue attacks. The same amount of respondents said passwordless authentication is a priority for their organization.
SMB leaders should heed IT teams’ concerns about the vulnerabilities introduced by tool sprawl and cuts in security budgets, and their pleas for security improvements, Bhargava said.
The JumpCloud survey reached more than 500 respondents was conducted by Propeller Insights in October 2022.
