A/NZ IT leaders would sacrifice security for performance

IT leaders in Australia and New Zealand admit to being willing to sacrifice cybersecurity to improve application performance, according to new research from F5 Networks.

The security company’s 2022 State of Application Strategy Report found that 52% of IT leaders in the two markets say they would turn off cybersecurity measures to boost performance.

The survey results paint a picture of IT leaders struggling to balance security considerations with the need to pursue rapid digitalisation.

“Organisations across A/NZ are facing the challenges of delivering distributed modern digital services given the dramatic uptake in digital transformation efforts in the last two years. IT and business objectives are converging to elevate technology from a supporting role to a driving role,” F5 Networks regional VP for Australia and New Zealand Jason Baden said.

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic acceleration of organisations moving into the cloud — single, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. As organisations’ portfolios grow larger and more distributed, they require consistent security, end-to-end visibility and greater automation in app deployments to battle increasing complexity, streamline operations and respond to threats while adding value for customers.”

The move to the cloud is resulting in increasingly untenable levels of complexity, the report indicates.

While most A/NZ respondents are already using cloud-based as-a-service offerings, associated challenges range from overlapping security policies and fragmented data to the deployment of point solutions that ultimately add complexity, increase fragility or inhibit performance.

Meanwhile, 85% of organisations from the two countries are currently repatriating applications from the cloud onto on-premise environments or are planning to do so within the next 12 months.

The challenges are only likely to increase, with the report finding that 90% of organisations across all industries are planning to implement AI to surface valuable insights. But at the same time effective AI requires better data transparency, integration and governance than is currently available.

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