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According to Kaspersky Lab research, 64 percent of companies with fewer than 250 employees use one or more forms of Software as a Service (SaaS). Only 66 percent of SMEs have difficulty managing their heterogeneous IT systems.

According to Kaspersky Lab, it would be difficult for SMEs to keep control over the security of valuable customer data. The lack of internal knowledge is one of the reasons for this. This is shown by Kaspersky Lab’s survey of 3041 IT employees at SMEs in 29 countries.

Cloud

The cloud offers many options for SMEs. For example, half of the companies with fewer than 50 employees have employees who regularly work outdoors. For slightly larger companies – with 50 to 250 employees – this is 40%.

These employees must also be able to access data and applications from outside, which is often arranged via the cloud. The larger the company, the greater the need for cloud services. For example, 73 percent of SMEs with 50 to 250 people use at least one cloud service. In smaller organisations, this is the case in 56 percent of the cases.

Other common SaaS solutions include email, document storage, collaboration services and accounting packages.

Lack of knowledge

However, according to the study, internal IT specialists do not always have enough knowledge in house for a new approach to infrastructure management. In addition, 14 percent of companies entrust IT security management to employees who are not allowed to call themselves IT specialists. This creates security risks that are not recognized, as most attention is paid to the growth of the company.

Moreover, in smaller organisations, there is no clear insight into who exactly is responsible for data protection, because the data is held by cloud services. 64 percent of companies with less than 50 employees believe that the cloud provider is responsible for security. 56 percent of the larger SMEs share this view.

There are therefore many risks when it comes to ensuring the safety of valuable customer data. 64 percent of SMEs and 49 percent of very small organizations store customer data on mobile devices. If that goes wrong, there is a risk of reputational and commercial damage.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.