V12’s Covid-19 Business Impact Survey* (May 2020) showed that over half the respondents considered IT security as one of the most important concerns: indeed 38% cited it as very important with regard to their IT systems.

With a dispersed workforce which was predominantly using residential broadband and domestic routers, over 66% of those polled felt that the cyber threat across their organisation had increased after lockdown.

0%
Agree cybersecurity is very important to their IT systems
0%
Agree that the threat of cyber attacks has increased after the lockdown
0%
Reported that their customers were much more concerned
0%
Only 2% of businesses polled will not consider Microsoft teams

It’s not just their own organisational security that poses a challenge; almost three quarters indicated that the Covid-19 pandemic had impacted their customers’ concerns about cybersecurity and data protection. 30% reported that their customers were much more concerned about data breaches, network security and cyber-attacks than in a pre-pandemic environment.

So, with security as a clear priority, we asked whether cybersecurity would be part of the decision-making process when buying information communications technology going forward: only 4% said it was not part of the evaluation procedure.

With Microsoft Teams and Zoom being considered the technology winners in the short and medium term, and with Teams being considered more secure than other technologies, we looked at the reasons why an organisation would consider using or adopt Teams.

2% would not consider Teams at all; 7% had already deployed Teams across their organisation and out of the remainder almost a third are, or are planning to, implement it to take advantage of the wide range of security protection it offers.

With homeworking becoming the new normal, over a quarter of our respondents nominated the powerful collaborative working tools that Teams can provide as a reason to adopt this technology.

Conclusion on Cybersecurity

Our survey concluded that security and business continuity are the overriding considerations when these enterprises are deploying technology. Indeed, many of V12’s customers had already been using Teams at lockdown, and with the added benefit of Direct Routing, it enabled them to add homeworkers to their system and carry on without interruption to their business.

*Survey commissioned by V12 and conducted by Larato, May 2020.