Earlier this week, Symantec released the results of their 2013 Global SMB IT Confidence Index. This report is based on the responses from 2452 SMB organizations (1-20 employees) from 20 countries, all of whom were asked 17 questions which were condensed to form an overall confidence rating. Respondents were all responsible for their organization’s IT. The report found three tiers of SMB in terms of business success, top, middle and bottom, which correlated directly to their confidence score.
The Symantec study showed that top tier SMBs had leaders with experience in larger organizations, and that 63% of these organizations used IT to strategically drive their business. In addition, many of these companies invested in much higher-level IT infrastructure, such as mobility and cloud, and 78% rated themselves as more secure, while 58% rated storage management as “easy.”
There was a very large gap between the top and bottom tiers in this report, with only 44% of the bottom-tier SMBs using IT strategically to push business forward. On the matter of security, 39% of the bottom-tier SMBs listed themselves as secure, and only 13% saw fewer breaches and attacks.
Brian Burch, Vice President of Global Consumer and Small Business Marketing, Symantec, offered this summary of the report in a press release this week: “There appears to be a positive correlation between protecting their information assets and achieving their business goals. If small businesses want to maximize their success, they need to embrace IT as a strategic tool with the potential to deliver a competitive advantage and really drive their business.”
To view an infographic of the report, please visit the site here.
