The trends of the past few years with respect to workplace technology use have greatly expanded the ability of all businesses – small, medium and large – to grow faster, experiment more and stay connected with one another (and the systems they work with). More and more, workers actually have a choice in the kinds of devices, software, and cloud-based applications they can use to get their work done. Organizations can even enable remote work. And, all of this is a positive shift – it helps users be more effective and (hopefully!) more efficient, but it adds significant complexity to an IT organization\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hegemony of Windows is gone – Mac continues to proliferate throughout businesses worldwide<\/a> as a prominent workstation choice (and at JumpCloud we even see a larger-than-you-might-think use of Ubuntu workstations across our user base), and Linux powers 96% of servers worldwide<\/a>. Small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) use 100 SaaS applications on average<\/em><\/a>, in addition to working more and more within the cloud-based environments that support business applications. This might have made the move to remote work easier if not for the fact that IT also needs to support and maintain legacy, on-prem solutions like Active Directory to provide access to many of these same applications and environments. Even before COVID-19 hit these trends were adding continual pressure to the bottom line in terms of complexity and management costs; 2020 kicked these trends into overdrive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And on top of all of that, the security implications are stark; SME\u2019s were already targeted for malicious attacks before the rise in remote work scenarios, which has only made things worse. According to a report published by Malwarebytes<\/a>, 20 percent of cybersecurity leaders say they have faced a security breach because of a remote worker in 2020. Phishing attacks are on the rise and as an example, 74% of data breaches started with privileged credential abuse. And if that wasn\u2019t enough to worry about, IT admins are also facing more complex compliance regulations and mandates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n