Research Objectives
Requirements from widespread work-from-anywhere policies have escalated the need for endpoint management and security convergence. IT and security teams need broad management, prevention, detection, and response capabilities that span endpoint devices and operating environments that are often outside of their control, which is driving many to desire convergence between management and security capabilities to simplify implementation, ongoing management, and risk mitigation.
IT and security teams require new mechanisms capable of providing common visibility, assessment, mitigation of software and configuration vulnerabilities, threat prevention, and support for threat investigation and response activities. These management and security activities are deeply intertwined, requiring integrated workflows between IT and security teams.
In order to gain further insights into these trends, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 381 IT and cybersecurity decision makers involved with endpoint management and security technologies and processes at midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (1,000 or more employees) organizations in North America (US and Canada).
This study sought to answer the following questions:
- Approximately what percentage of employees work remotely, in either a remote or home office?
- On average, approximately how many endpoint devices does each employee in an organization interact with daily?
- How do organizations characterize the state of endpoint security and management in terms of level of difficulty?
- Approximately what percentage of organizations’ endpoints are actively monitored?
- Approximately what percentage of total endpoints do organizations consider to be unmanaged or have only a limited ability to manage/secure?
- Have organizations experienced some type of cyber-attack in which the attack itself started through an exploit of an unknown, unmanaged, or poorly managed endpoint?
- How many different tools and technologies do organizations use for endpoint management and security?
- Have organizations consolidated the teams or individuals responsible for endpoint management and endpoint security?
- What has driven or is driving the consolidation of endpoint management and security? What are the biggest impediments for greater consolidation of endpoint management and security?
- Do organizations use desktop or application virtualization? What percentage of total PCs/client access devices has been virtualized via desktop or application virtualization solutions, and how is this expected to change over the next three years?
- What specific types of employees are the initial and/or primary users of desktop or application virtualization environments?
- What actions do organizations believe would most improve their endpoint management and security?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
