A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) study says government information technology leaders said they expect agencies to make cybersecurity spending a priority for fiscal year 2022 amid the recent cyberattacks.
IBM said Thursday it commissioned Morning Consult to survey more than 500 current and former U.S. government IT decision makers in June and found that more than 75 percent of respondents said moving data to the cloud is a challenge.
Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they consider security risks as the top barrier to cloud migration. The survey also showed that security outweighs cost reduction by nearly twofold as the reason for advancing IT modernization.
“With the President’s executive orders, the U.S. Federal market is facing a massive transformation to its cybersecurity strategy which requires a great deal of technological modernization. While this is a priority for government IT decisions makers, our survey found that they view security as both a driver and barrier to modernization,” said Howard Boville, head of IBM Cloud Platform.
The Government Index for IT Modernization report showed that between 64 percent and 82 percent of respondents said they believe their current or former agencies are somewhat or very prepared for ransomware and other cyberattacks. However, over 40 percent of IT decision makers said they think agencies will need at least three years to comply with the president’s executive order on encryption and zero trust.
The survey also found that 46 percent of respondents said they consider security as a primary concern that restricts them from working with third-party vendors.
Fifty percent of government IT leaders said their agencies are using a combination of security tools for cloud and on-premise threats.
“Enterprise technology providers are stewards of massive volumes of personal data, and we need to do our utmost to protect this data. A public and private sector partnership that adopts an open and secured hybrid cloud architecture with sophisticated security capabilities can help agencies ensure that data truly remains theirs, even in a multi-cloud environment,” Boville added.
