2017 Top 10 SMB and Midmarket Business Issues, IT Challenges, IT Priorities

They are here. Techaisle's annual SMB and Midmarket Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges and Business Issues. This is the 5th year of Techaisle tracking at a WW level and is much sought after by IT vendors, channels and media. For 2017, Techaisle investigated 15 different technology areas, each with several sub-technology categories, 20 different IT challenges and 20 different business issues.

Click on the infographic images below to view and download your copy

When compared with 2016 the list for 2017 SMB and Midmarket Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges and Business Issues reveals major changes – digitalization has become an IT priority and supporting digital marketing/workplace an IT challenge, improving workforce productivity as a business issue has catapulted to the top, enabling mobile workforce is among the top 3 IT challenges and Collaboration, Cloud, Mobility and Security are the IT priorities. Cloud orchestration has also appeared for the first time in the list of IT challenges as IT is finding it necessary to orchestrate across the entire enterprise to deliver business infrastructure via the cloud.

In 2014 Techaisle had predicted that despite vendor tendency towards defining collaboration, mobility and cloud as separate domains, SMB users would start viewing them as integrated components of business solutions. 2017 IT priorities have made it very clear that the SMB user believes and wants collaboration, mobility and cloud to be default attributes of all modern applications.

It is natural for security to be one of the top IT priorities. Techaisle survey data shows that in 2016, 64% of SMBs had one or more mobility security breach. SMBs are not only increasingly dependent on IT, – they are dependent on increasingly-interconnected systems, which are in turn accessible via an ever-expanding population of devices and access points. A hardened perimeter is only as hard as its softest point and the perimeter has become dynamic, flexible with increasing data flow across boundaries in cloud networks.

2016 was the year when SMBs and midmarket businesses started exploring true digitization but they suffered from lack of direction, skills and investments from senior management rather than lack of IT enthusiasm. 2017 seems to be the year when they have realized that in a hyper-competitive world digitalization will become a differentiator.

There are several differences by regions.

Click on the image below to view and download your copy of 2017 Top 10 SMB Business Issues, IT Priorities and IT Challenges

Click on the image below to view and download your copy of 2017 Top 10 Midmarket Business Issues, IT Priorities and IT Challenges