Security Fears and Inadequate Infrastructure Investments Shake IT Confidence, According to New Intermedia Report

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The Index surveyed 350 ITDMs, statistically measuring IT confidence levels on a 10-point scale (where zero represents "not confident at all" and 10 represents "extremely confident"). Questions spanned across four topic categories – Security, General IT Services, Infrastructure and Skilled IT Workforce.

Jonathan Levine , CTO at Intermedia, said: "Given the critical role IT plays in underpinning business today, a Confidence Score of 7.2 is worrisome. You wouldn't feel comfortable boarding an airplane if the pilot had a 7.2 confidence level in the plane's airworthiness. This modest confidence suggests that organizations may be more exposed than leaders realize. We'll be watching closely to see if further cloud adoption helps improve confidence, or if the insufficient attention given to IT concerns today will further erode confidence in the coming year."

Across all four categories, the Index revealed a stark contrast in overall confidence levels with small companies with fewer than 50 employees (Confidence Score of 5.9) versus medium to large companies, which had higher Confidence Scores (8.7 and 8.9, respectively). As company size and cloud adoption increased, so did confidence levels.

Michael Gold , CEO of Intermedia, said: "Consistently, IT professionals at smaller companies measured as less confident than larger ones, expressing concerns about their ability to protect and support their organizations. This uncertainty presents MSPs with a real opportunity to help SMBs that don't have the resources to run IT on their own."

Other highlights include:

To download the report and view complete results from the 2016 IT Confidence Index, please visit: Intermedia.net/ITConfidence2016.

The IT Confidence Index, which surveyed 350 IT decision makers in the U.S., was conducted by Precision Sample and commissioned by Intermedia. The IT Confidence Index is the average of IT Confidence Scores from four topic areas: General IT Services, Security, Infrastructure and Skilled IT Workforce. Each score was calculated using a 10-point question scale, which asks respondents to rate their level of confidence between "not confident at all" and "extremely confident."

Intermedia is a one-stop shop for cloud business applications. Its Office in the Cloud™ suite integrates the essential IT applications that companies need, including email, voice, file backup and sharing, conferencing, instant messaging, identity and access management, mobility, security and archiving – all delivered by a single provider – and integrated into one control panel. Intermedia services offer enterprise-grade security, a 99.999 percent uptime service level agreement and award-winning 24/7 support, as certified by TSIA and J.D. Power.

Intermedia's over 700 employees serve over 1,000,000 users across more than 75,000 businesses and 6,000 active partners, including VARs, MSPs, key distributors and telecoms. Its Partner Program lets partners sell under their own brand with control over billing, pricing and other elements of their customer relationships. Intermedia is the world's largest independent provider of Exchange email in the cloud and one of the leading cloud voice providers. For more information, visit Intermedia.net.

For the purposes of this survey, infrastructure was defined as "server, storage and network components, not including software."