IT manager survey forecasts surge in secure remote access
Aventail announced the results of a survey of 604 IT decision-makers confirming that secure remote access usage will continue to increase rapidly over the next 12 months. Key drivers of this trend include the increased usage of mobile devices and wireless LANs, more robust disaster recovery planning, and the overriding need for users to be both productive and secure in each of these use cases.
Organizations will continue to expand secure remote access usage in the more traditional use cases of teleworkers and home computer users. Survey respondents rated “security” as the top criteria in making a purchasing decision for their new secure remote access solutions, with “easy to use” and “easy to install and manage” also extremely important.
Survey participants were managers or senior executives in IT, networking, and/or security departments, and came from organizations that were researching SSL VPNs. Organizations were of all sizes, with over half having more than 1000 employees. Additionally, most organizations already had significant experience with secure remote access solutions, with more than 50% of them already supporting at least some remote access for teleworkers, traveling employees, home computer users, wireless LAN users, and mobile device users.
Top findings included:
– 77% of organizations support secure remote access for teleworkers today
– Secure remote access usage will increase significantly over the next 12 months, when 85% of organizations will support secure remote access from mobile devices, 82% from a wireless LAN, and 75% for disaster recovery.
– 98% of respondents rated “security” as an extremely or very important criteria in making a decision to purchase a secure remote access solution, making it the #1 criterion.
– “Ease of use” and “easy to install and manage” were also top purchasing criteria, with 89% and 84% or respondents, respectively, rating them as extremely or very important.
– “Well-known brand” was deemed not to be an important criterion, with only 44% of respondents rating it as extremely or very important.
In searching for the right secure remote access solution, IT managers rely on experts, as well as doing their own research from a variety of sources. For expert guidance, IT managers most often rely on their peers in other companies (81%), but also often turn to industry analysts (75%). The top source of research is IT magazines (83%), with significant numbers of participants also using a combination of search engines, online sites, tradeshows, and seminars. While blogs are a relatively new form of media, 14% of respondents stated that they use blogs as a key source of information.