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Modern organizations are overwhelmed by data. They have massive amounts of it but have serious data accessibility problems.
In Ivanti’s 2024 State of Cybersecurity Report, 72% of respondents said security data and IT data at their organizations are siloed. That increases cybersecurity risks, lowers productivity and prevents organizations from readily accessing data that can offer a holistic view of their security and IT operations.
Why do these data access problems persist?
When IT cannot readily access data, it has serious knock-on effects — from dragging down productivity and operational efficiency to impeding data-driven decision-making and slowing innovation.
82%of IT professionals say data silos negatively impact productivity. |
63%say data silos slow security response times. |
54%say silos weaken the organization’s security posture. |
One of the most significant negative impacts may be to AI deployment. AI promises outsized efficiency and insights to organizations that adopt it … but without accessible, standardized data, even data-rich organizations cannot capitalize on the potential of AI.
Case in point: Use of AI/automation for IT ops is still relatively low — for example, just 40% of organizations use AI-aided help desk ticket resolution, and only 31% use intelligent escalation.
Ivanti CIO Robert Grazioli puts it plainly: “Without data, you’re not going to have AI. You need to establish data governance, create cross-functional teams and then focus on your data architecture. Those three things will lay the groundwork for you to successfully meet your expectations around AI.”
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A lack of data access isn’t the only problem. Organizations also suffer from serious data blind spots — areas where critical information is hidden from view.
These blind spots inhibit IT teams’ ability to analyze data across the organization and make data-driven, informed decisions. And from a security point of view, these blind spots can also lead to data breaches, ransomware attacks or network intrusions.
A prime example of a data blind spot: poor asset visibility. IT teams need access to telemetry data across a massive spectrum of systems, applications, users, devices and much more. But that’s just one dimension of the problem: getting a handle on known assets. IT teams also need the means to discover what unknown devices are using their organizations’ networks.
Ivanti’s research shows IT teams struggle to track even the basics.
Unmanaged BYOD is another serious blind spot.
39%of IT teams track device usage. |
35%log device age. |
32%track license provisioning. |
IT professionals say their current asset management solution does not track BYOD.
Organizations need to shine a light on these blind spots to dramatically expand asset visibility. The benefits of doing so include:
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Everywhere Work has driven up workloads for IT teams. 56% of those surveyed say help desk ticket volume is up, and 40% identified “More employees working remotely” as a contributing factor.
That increase in ticket volume may be contributing to talent turnover.
IT professionals (23%) say a colleague has resigned due to burnout.
When IT fails to treat data as a strategic organizational asset, it adds to these IT operations logjams — driving up inefficiency and driving down employee satisfaction.
Among IT professionals and leaders surveyed by Ivanti, the most cited strategic priority was “optimizing costs.” What’s more, a lack of skills/talent was the most cited barrier to effective IT operations.
When data is managed effectively, organizations can do both of these things: drive down costs and address skills shortages.
For example, most help desk tickets lack crucial information to speed resolution. Having ready access to relevant data associated with an IT ticket (e.g., device data, access permissions, etc.) can slash mean time to repair (MTTR) — among the most important metrics for the service desk.
AI has a role here as well: 84% of IT professionals believe AI and automation solutions — such as root-cause analysis and predictive maintenance — can help decrease IT ticket volume.
All these data-driven improvements are not just about efficiency. Improved access to data pays other important dividends. It can:
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IT has a significant problem with data standardization.
The question: “Which of these do you currently track as part of your IT asset management practice?” yielded surprisingly low response rates across all possible answers — suggesting how little consensus there is among IT admins about what types of data should be identified, collected and managed.
And many organizations are not taking advantage of a configuration management database (CMDB), which significantly enhances visibility of IT infrastructure and relationships and boosts efficiency.
These are all serious missed opportunities.
The power of IT data is the ability to access it at the right moment, standardize and normalize it so that it can inform decisions across the organization and map it so that teams can understand dependencies (i.e., how certain events/decisions can impact others).
The opportunities for driving efficiency and excellence are nearly endless:
Companies have tons and tons of data, but [success] isn’t about data collection, it’s about data management and insight.
— Prashanth Southekal, business analytics author, professor, head of the Data for Business Performance Institute
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Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala
Chief Product Officer, Ivanti
Your devices, users, software … everything produces data and telemetry. All that data needs to be woven into a so-called “data fabric” — a unified, accessible view of your organization’s data from different systems, teams and sources. Your single source of truth.
Once you have that data fabric in place, you can then apply AI and analytics to comb through all those millions of data points, making connections and mining deep insights that humans alone cannot.
The best way to optimize workflows and remove friction is to first build that data fabric. Define the key problems you want to solve, then build solutions on top of that unified data foundation. Don’t expect magical efficiencies just from buying a product — you need that underlying data fabric strategy. 80% of the value will come from integrating your core data sources, but the remaining 20% will be very specific to your organization’s needs. So start by understanding what data you have and where, then weave it into a fabric. Within that, define the lanes for different teams to access what they need. If it’s operations data, the ops team owns it. If it’s security data, that’s the security team’s domain. But they’re all building on that same unified data fabric as the foundation. That’s how you enable true enterprise automation and efficiency.
Robert Grazioli
Chief Information Officer, Ivanti
There’s a lot of buzz around AI, but there are three specific areas companies need to focus on in the near term to activate their AI strategy:
Sirjad Parakkat
Vice President of Engineering, Ivanti
When organizations treat data as an asset, they invest in it, manage it, measure it and protect it, just as they would a traditional asset.
Once you have your objectives aligned and your data accessible, it’s time to apply AI on your data to deliver deep insights and prescriptive analytics.
This report is based in part on two surveys conducted by Ivanti in late 2023 and early 2024: “2024 Everywhere Work Report: Empowering Flexible Work” and “ 2024 State of Cybersecurity: Inflection Point.” In total, these two studies surveyed 15,000 executive leaders, IT professionals, security professionals and office workers. This report looks specifically at the 3,059 leaders, IT professionals and security professionals surveyed across the two studies.
Get key findings and survey results, including charts and graphs, in a presentation-ready format
