With cybercrime becoming a greater threat to companies, a new report finds that it’s just one of the technology challenges facing middle-market businesses.
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Of the companies that are currently deploying or using cloud-based services, 35 percent see information security as the greatest challenge. Ensuring data integrity and reliability ranks second among their concerns, at 30 percent. Less than two-thirds of the executives polled said their company has an integrated set of policies and procedures for remote access to data and smart phone use, and less than half said they have policies relating to tablets, social media and instant messaging.
Nearly a quarter of the executives reveal that their companies subsidize device purchases made by employees. Nearly a fifth of the companies surveyed by Deloitte have official “bring your own device,” or BYOD, policies, in which the company subsidizes the data and voice charges.
“As we focused on the middle-market companies we had an interest in how they were adopting technology, especially given the explosion in the types and quality of technology that are now available,” said Irwin Goverman, a principal in Deloitte Technology Strategy and Architecture Services at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “We wanted to see if this segment of the marketplace was able to take advantage of technology in the way that our larger clients were. The survey reached out to the C suite—CEOs, CFOs and CIOs—to ascertain whether they were adopting the newer technologies, how they were using them, what barriers there were, and what benefits they might expect.”
Deloitte looked at technologies like mobile and cloud computing and the adoption rate. Goverman noted that the risks of exposure to cyberattack were not a primary concern for the survey respondents.
“The main focus of the report was on the applicability of the newer technologies, and the pull-through, almost the demand for that type of technology coming though the consumerization and availability of data information,” he said. “In this middle-market segment, technology is definitely a catalyst for growth. We found that there was higher than expected adoption of mobile and cloud technology and data analytics. There was a pretty good correlation between using these technologies to reach customers, keep employees happy and make them more productive. We found that the customer-facing technologies were the most important, that is, Web sites, mobile stores and social media. But there were also concerns about using cloud computing and opening up the Web sites, and there were concerns about privacy, confidentiality and exposure of intellectual property.”
He noted that the bar has been raised quite a bit for investment in mobile and cloud technology in the middle market.
